The New York Times Book Review - Hillary Jordan
…gorgeous, devastating…As in his first novel, The Yellow Birds, Powers details…inhumane acts with elegance, restraint and a refreshing absence of sentimentality. His spare, meticulous sentences lend a perverse beauty to even the most brutal passages of the novel and give immediacy and emotional heft to the ordeals of its characters…The story's message is unambiguous: The cruelty we inflict on others harms not just our victims, but also ourselves, because we are all more intimately interconnected than we realize…A Shout in the Ruins…lays bare the tremendous suffering on which our country was founded and demands its acknowledgment. But Powers also offers love and grace in these pages, and a prayer for redemption…
Publishers Weekly
03/05/2018
This inconsistent follow-up to Powers’s PEN/Hemingway Award–winning The Yellow Birds traces the destructive legacy of slavery from the 19th century to the recent past. The first of the novel’s two main story lines centers on the Beauvais Plantation, contrasting the loveless marriage of its white owners, the young Emily Reid and the volatile Antony Levallois, with the profound connection between two of their slaves, Rawls and Nurse. The affecting second story line, set in 1950s Richmond, Va., concerns 90-year-old George Seldom, the child born of Levallois raping Nurse. Powers strikes a fine balance between the two narratives; less successful, though, are the tangential investigations into the lives of a union officer overseeing Reconstruction, Tom Fitzgerald, and a diner waitress whom George befriends, Lottie Moore. These sections feel like unnecessary padding that softens the impact of the novel as a whole. Emily, Rawls, and Nurse eventually have their violent confrontation with Levallois and make their respective flights from Beauvais, but the resolutions that the book then offers are either too coincidental, cheaply tragic, or vague. The reader is left with a shout that enervates more than it inspires. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge and White. (May)
From the Publisher
"A Shout in the Ruins is confirmation, if it were needed, that Kevin Powers is a writer of rare talent."—Financial Times
"Much as in The March E.L. Doctorow's epic civil war novel, Mr. Powers gives a strong sense of a vast body of humanity caught up in a tumult that still reverberates today... Above all this troubling, stirring book is informed by Mr. Powers's deep understanding of war's complexities, and of how people are broken and shaped by it."—The Economist
"The characters in Powers' bleak, stunning novel are subject to indignities too countless and cruel to name. Like his debut, The Yellow Birds, it's a searing look at the ravages of war, and how violence can shape a nation in ways that may never be fully recoverable.... It won't surprise anyone who's read The Yellow Birds that Powers is a hell of a writer. His use of language in A Shout in the Ruins - inspired, perhaps, by William Faulkner - is nothing short of brilliant, and he connects with his characters in a very real way; he explores their psyches with an uncommon sensitivity."—Michael Schaub, NPR
"Powers brings to Virginia battle scenes the same searing immediacy he brought to his stories of carnage in The Yellow Birds."—Ron Charles, Washington Post
"With a complex structure reminiscent of Faulkner, Powers adroitly weaves his narrative threads together with subtle connections that reinforce his themes of longing for coherence and the continuing effect of the past on the present. An impressive novel of slavery, destruction, and the arduous difficulties of love."—Kirkus, Starred Review
"Some passages in Powers' second novel, following his awarding-winning The Yellow Birds (2012), unfold with a fable's tragic inevitability, while specificity of setting and character, both strikingly described and original, will brand them into the reader's consciousness . . . Beautifully formed sentences express unsettling truths about humanity, yet tendrils of hope emerge, showing how love and kindness can take root in seemingly barren earth."—Booklist
"A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence."—Library Journal
"With a complex structure reminiscent of Faulkner, Powers adroitly weaves his narrative threads together with subtle connections that reinforce his themes of longing for coherence and the continuing effect of the past on the present. An impressive novel of slavery, destruction, and the arduous difficulties of love."—Kirkus, starred review
"Guided by a homing instinct for human truths, A Shout in the Ruins is a daring voyage into and out of the darkest era in American history"—Observer
"Suitably unvarnished, but not without moments of beauty or deep emotion. A Shout in the Ruins brushes aside myth and romanticism for a clear-eyed look at American heritage."—Shelf Awareness
"A masterpiece. Powers has written a novel that includes all the ferocity, complexity, and racial violence of the American South, from its fall to its eventual rebirth."—Philipp Meyer
"Kevin Powers has seamlessly woven nineteenth and twentieth century lives to create a novel that resonates out of the past to address the most timely issues of America in our own century. The same striking language and contemplation of war and its aftermath that made The Yellow Birds such a lauded debut is on full display in A Shout in the Ruins. What an impressive novel."—Ron Rash
"A harrowing and lyrical epic in miniature, Powers has written a novel excavated from another time, but which speaks profoundly to this one."
—Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing
Praise for The Yellow Birds:
"A remarkable first novel...The Yellow Birds is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined bildungsroman about a soldier's coming of age, a harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory...Extraordinary."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"The Yellow Birds might just be the first American literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war."—Los Angeles Times
"An elegiac, sober, and haunting coming-of-age war story."—TIME
"The first great Iraq War novel."—Darren Reidy, Rolling Stone
"A first novel as compact and powerful as a footlocker full of ammo....Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the frailty of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen."—Benjamin Percy, New York Times Book Review
"An exquisite excavation of the war's moral and psychological wreckage. Powers evokes the peculiar smell and feel of the war better than any journalist."—The New Yorker
"Darkly beautiful....How to tell a true war story if you're more a poet than a novelist? Tell it as a poet would. Tell it as Kevin Powers does."—Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered
"A novel of grit, grace, and blood by an Iraq war veteran....Kevin Powers moves gracefully between spare, factual description of the soldiers' work to simple, hard-won reflections on the meaning of war."—Ron Charles, Washington Post
"An unusually spare and lyrical war story....The characters are sketched with as much heart as economy...Like the Iraq heat, which 'had the surprising effect of reducing one to tears in an instant,' The Yellow Birds skulks along, detached and undemanding, until all of a sudden you turn a page and find yourself weeping."—GQ
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-03-06
Spanning more than 120 years, Powers' (Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, 2014, etc.) new novel is an exploration of the ongoing effects of the Civil War.Alternating chapters between the Civil War era and the mid-20th century, the novel opens with the mysterious disappearance, and rumored death, of Emily Reid Levallois in the late 1860s and then moves back to look over her life beginning with her birth. Her father, Bob, was a mule skinner in Chesterfield County outside of Richmond, Virginia, whose work paid for a "modest but respectable" house and two slaves, Aurelia and her son, Rawls. The Reids live next to the Beauvais Plantation, owned by the coldly cruel Antony Levallois, one of those planters who "dreamed their farms were kingdoms." After Rawls tries to run away, looking for a fellow slave named Nurse he's met and fallen in love with, Levallois buys him, Aurelia, and a Percheron horse for about $1,400, demonstrating in a deft stroke the cruel position of slaves as mere animals to their owners. Levallois was happy with his purchase: "Accounting for inflation, he damn near got the horse for free." Meanwhile, in a story set in the 1950s, we meet George Seldom, now in his 90s and on a quest to seek out some of the places associated with his childhood. While at first the two narratives seem to have little relationship to each other, as the novel progresses we learn of the intricate connections between characters over generations. Back amid the chaos of the Civil War, Bob Reid joins the Confederate army and is badly wounded, his life coming even further apart when he learns that Emily has taken shelter at Beauvais and that Levallois has plans to marry her. With a complex structure reminiscent of Faulkner, Powers adroitly weaves his narrative threads together with subtle connections that reinforce his themes of longing for coherence and the continuing effect of the past on the present.An impressive novel of slavery, destruction, and the arduous difficulties of love.
