Saturday, October 18, 2014

Blog Tour: Rush of Shadows by Catherine Bell (Review + Giveaway)


Title: Rush of Shadows 
Author: Catherine Bell 
Synopsis: When American pioneers set their hearts on a California valley where Indians had been living for thousands of years, a period of uneasy appraisal emerged, followed by conflict and soon enough by genocide. The epic greed and violence of the 1850's and 60's has been brushed aside by history, conveniently forgotten in the pride of conquest. Willful ignorance and cruelty, terror and desperation were common in that time, but there were moments too of nobility and compassion, ingenuity and forgiveness, qualities which might have prevailed if certain things had been different. Rush of Shadows brings to life two freethinking women, Mellie, a white, and Bah


My Review:
Rush of Shadows is a must read for historical novels. The story takes place on an American period that is well known though is focused on the difficult relationships between Native Americans and the new settlers. 

The story is narrated as a diary by the set of different characters though its main focus is the frail friendship that borns between Mellie and Bah two women from different cultures that will learn to accept each other in a period where being friendly with the Indians was kind of dangerous. The fact that the main characters are women is a powerful narrating device in itself since in that time women had no rights. 

The writing style is powerful and catching full of truth and fiction at the same time. Rush of Shadows will get the readers attention for its powerful prose and will keep the readers hook by the beautiful yet hard story of America´s history.

Meet Catherine Bell
 
Catherine Bell grew up in a New England family with a sense of its past as distinguished and its culture superior, as chronicled in many of her short stories.  An early reader, she found in fiction that penetrating experience of other people's lives that opens a wider world.  The Winsor School, Harvard, and Stanford prepared her to recognize good writing and thinking.  She credits work as a gardener, cook, cashier, waitress, and schoolbus driver with teaching her how to live in that wider world.

She has also worked as a secretary, freelance writer, and therapist, served as a teacher in the Peace Corps, and taught in inner city schools.  She has lived in Paris, Brasilia, Nova Scotia, Northern California, and Washington, D.C.  Culture clashes, even within families, are often subjects of her fiction.  She has published stories in a number of journals, including Midway Journal, Coal City Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Sixfold, Solstice, and South Carolina Review.  Her story "Among the Missing" won The Northern Virginia Review's 2014 Prose Award.   

She researched and wrote Rush of Shadows, her first novel, over a period of twenty years after she married a fourth-generation Californian and fell in love with his home territory, the Coast Range.  The bright sunburned hills, dark firs, clear shallow streams, and twisted oaks were splendid, but the old barns and wooden churches and redwood train station didn't seem old enough.  Where was the long past?   Where were the Indians?  There was only the shadow of a story passed down by her husband’s grandmother late in life.  Born in 1869, she grew up playing with Indian children whose parents worked on the ranch her father managed.  One day the Army came to remove the Indians and march them to the reservation, and that was that.  She was four years old, and she never forgot.     

Bell lives with her husband in Washington, D.C. and visits children and grandchildren in California and Australia.  As a teacher at Washington International School, she loves reading great books with teenagers. 

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