Do You like book The Turtle Warrior (2005)?
This was like reading the potential for a good book, instead of a good book.I had trouble with this book for a couple reasons. Firstly, it is trying to put out there the tragedy of abuse, but it also is a giant rant about Vietnam, and that undertones everything in the book. Instead of a tangible read about an abused family, it is a revolving door of anti war raging, and how it, and the patriarch system, are the cause of all grief and abuse, the root source of it all, which is so incredibly generic, that I couldn't find it realistic in the least. The second issue was the haphazard way in which the book was written. It randomly jumps from the past to the future to the present, and from one person's memories or thoughts to the next. Most of it is kind of hard to follow, and they all think in the first tense, so that makes it harder, because usually a name to help orientate you to who is currently thinking is three paragraphs after the thought has begun. Thirdly, the ending was long and drawn out. It should have been a satisfying final set of three paragraphs instead of the overdone run down that it was. The book only had a few minor editing issues, it was the writing itself that made this book dissatisfactory to me, even though the story itself held potential and good character growth in places.The author does have some good moral value in the book, and certainly it is by far not the worst book I have ever read. It just was irritating to finish. And I do not think of reading the majority of the time as a chore.
—Lyl Lyl
If breaking my leg last May accomplished nothing else, it has left me with a summer's worth of reading to report on in the Bookhouse. One of these is The Turtle Warrior, by Mary Relindes Ellis, sent to me by my friend Bonnie.It's set in northern Wisconsin, familiar territory for me. I know those poor farms, that stony land, old barns with outdated, broken down machinery. I know the lure of the woods, the quiet depth of snow. Settling into The Turtle Warrior was, in some ways, like going home.I'm lucky. I don't know first hand the pain of abusive marriage or gross parental cruelty. But I have known a few victims. One of the characters in my first novel, The Year of the Crow, was such a one.The Turtle Warrior was a slow read for me. I read a chapter a night, taking only as much beauty and pain as I could swallow at one sitting. But isn't that one of the reasons we read? To remember beauty or discover beauty we never knew? To live for a moment in pain we can't otherwise know? Or to revisit the pain we do know, searching for footprints in the snow that lead to redemption?
—Barbara Stoner
I am not usually one to read "the book of the moment", but I was intrigued by The Turtle Warrior. Initially, I was disappointed. Yet another book about the effects of the Vietnam War on its "survivors", a drunken, abusive father, and a crazy mother living in the backwoods? Haven't these themes been explored in unison, like, a zillion times before? However, Ellis' use of multiple narrators, including the voice of a dead soldier, gives these well-worn subjects new depth. It would have been fascinating to hear from the abusive patriarch, John Lucas, in the first person. That kind of narration would have brought this novel to a whole new level. However, Ellis spins her story moderately well, and the last hundred plus pages of the book are redemptive, haunting, and beautiful. Added bonus, the book takes place in northern Wisconsin, a place that fascinates this mid-western girl!
—Christy Sibila
