12 June 2020

Review: Stringtown on the Pike by John Uri Lloyd

Hardcover, 414 pages
Published 1900
Acquired July 2019
Read November 2019
Stringtown On the Pike: A Tale of Northernmost Kentucky by John Uri Lloyd

I read this as part of my project to read novels set in or near my hometown of Cincinnati; "Stringtown" is a fictionalized version of Florence, Kentucky, about 12 miles away from Cincinnati, and 26 miles from where I grew up. A few scenes are set in Cincinnati, as the protagonist goes to UC for chemistry classes. It's set shortly after the Civil War, and I gather was very popular in its day. (Lloyd wrote a further five novels about the denizens of Stringtown.)

It's also inexplicably boring. People just talk and talk about stuff that doesn't matter; there's no coherence to this thing, and when there is, half of it is in terrible black dialect, so it's virtually unreadable. I got bogged down in this book for months. Tons of side-stories that go nowhere, a main plot that borders on the incomprehensible, a romance you won't give two shits about. I regret slogging through to the end.

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