Book Review: "Ninety-Six: Cleveland's Story" by James A Carter

I love reading independently published literature. People who write a novel and then publish it out of the want to actually get their story out and not for the marketing deals or to make money are some of the purest forms of literature you can find. Though they are few and far between, it is always a good idea to check out the Kindle Unlimited sections of Amazon in order to find some hidden gems. Amazon has really helped me find more and more independently published people, self-published authors and books which for some reason, hardly anyone has checked out yet. I have, in my time, found a ton of great books because of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited sections and by looking at things such as “CreateSpace” (an independent publishing space) and I have also managed to find things published by friends and stories by people I have met online in these spaces. Recently, I have read a story called “Ninety-Six: Cleveland’s Story” by James A Carter which starts with a prologue explaining who Cleveland is in almost a news-like style. Then, we get the real story and go back. It is here that we see the real history behind the family represented by the most turbulent parts of modern US history.

I think that my favourite part of the book has to be when Baron goes to join the army and then goes to war. He explains that people in war normally don’t die from their injuries but instead die from horrible diseases including malaria and other fatalities. This is described as absolutely gut-wrenching, to watch these people die of things that were completely unknown of how to deal with for them. It is here that Baron loses his fingers and honestly, I cannot describe how intense this scene is that when he comes back from war just to realise that he cannot do what he did before and is practically a changed man with aspects of horrid PTSD. He has this thing about explaining what the ‘oaths’ and ‘promises’ costed him by holding up his right hand (symbolic obviously and the emotional tension at this point is at great heights).

Another thing I enjoyed about this book is the sheer amount of American History. You don’t see it through the eyes of someone writing a textbook but through a generational difference from one man to another. From one family to the next it goes on and on - by the time we get to Cleveland therefore, we have been through some intense, harrowing and extreme lengths of history and it has been such an emotional ride. The Civil War is so well-explored from the aspects of the war itself all the way down to the people who live in and around this area, in this time and near this place. It is such a beautifully American Rural Novel, it has all this purity of one of the Golden Ages of America in which the USA was building the ideas we so commonly associate with it today.

The deaths of the rural aspects in the midst of the novel as rural becomes urban reminds me a lot of the writings of Mark Twain - where Huckleberry Finn seems discontented with the changing world and his own sense of needing to be taught in terms of a formal education, the characters of Carter’s novel are coming to terms with their entire worlds collapsing and being rebuilt. The problem is not that they don’t want them to collapse but that they have hardly anything to help rebuild it when it finally does.

This is a truly beautiful, disturbing and honest novel about one of the most trying and turbulent times in American History.