Mudbound

Interesting and believable characters for the most part, and yet . . . the story seemed awfully familiar, the plot without surprise (it's not hard to guess even from knowing the premise what's going to happen), the dialogue not completely convincing. And maybe my biggest complaint is that agenda-driven fiction (here: racists are evil) is so hard to pull off. Kingsolver can do it, which is maybe why Jordan won Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize, but few others can. The character of Pappy is as flat as a character can be because he represents the evil racists. Henry, on the other hand, isn't a bad man, but he's interesting because he's still racist. Even Jamie isn't flawless.

I also didn't care for the multiple first person points of view. It made the narrative much too diffuse. Six of them? Or more? And I occasionally lost track of which section I was in, a danger with this approach.