Revelator

Man, I seem consistently drawn to stories about moonshiners, but somehow they all end up being rather humdrum.

Revelator is the story of Stella Birch, of her adolescence in the cove raised by her strict and strange grandmother, and her role as the revelator of a small cult; and ten years later, having left the cove behind, making money as a moonshiner, and then called back after her grandmother dies and she has to finally face the choices she made back then. Do you ever get the feeling when you're reading something that the author made an outline and just never deviated from it? Or just never found the seeds in the middle that would make it grow into something special? This was one of those books for me.

Revelator is unique, but also pretty straight forward. As such, I don't have much to say about it. It's fine? I loved the dialogue, and the prose flowed well enough that when I sat down to read it it was relatively easy to get sucked in. Though that was mostly when I was reading adult Stella's chapters, young Stella was very frustrating and kind of annoying. I wanted to dig more into who Stella had become, but most of plot I found uninteresting, which came through in the climax and finale which I really had to push myself through and largely skim to finish.

I like this book for its atmosphere, and it is delightfully weird in many ways. However, the characters and plot just didn't have a whole lot of pull.