Autumn in Carthage by Christopher Zenos (book review)

Autumn in Carthage

About the book:

Nathan Price is a college professor with crippling impairments, seeking escape from his prison of necessity. One day, in a package of seventeenth-century documents from Salem Village, he stumbles across a letter by his best friend, Jamie, who had disappeared six months before. The document is dated 1692‹the height of the Witch Trials. The only potential lead: a single mention of Carthage, a tiny town in the Wisconsin northern highland.

The mystery catapults Nathan from Chicago to the Wisconsin wilderness. There, he meets Alanna, heir to an astonishing Mittel-European legacy of power and sacrifice. In her, and in the gentle townsfolk of Carthage, Nathan finds the refuge for which he has long yearned. But Simon, the town elder, is driven by demons of his own, and may well be entangled in Jamie¹s disappearance and that of several Carthaginians. As darkness stretches toward Alanna, Nathan may have no choice but to risk it allŠ

Moving from the grimness of Chicago¹s South Side to the Wisconsin hinterlands to seventeenth-century Salem, this is a story of love, of sacrifice, of terrible passions‹and of two wounded souls quietly reaching for the deep peace of sanctuary.

My thoughts:

 

Autumn in Carthage by Christopher Zenos,  follows the travels of Nathan Price as he embarks on a quest to find his friend who has seemingling vanished into thin air. This is a story of time travel interspersed in real life. We are talking about the time of the Salem witch trials and modern day. I found that the story unfolded rather slowly but without the typical fancifulness of time travel scenarios. There is a lot to take in with this story, including taking into account Nathan's mental illness, which is a prominent theme throughout the story.

 

I will say that I liked the second half of the story better than the first, mainly because that was where I felt the meat of the story was. I felt that the first half of the story moved rather slowly and was difficult for me to get into....

 

Overall, this was a good read. Not great, but not bad either.

 

Disclaimer: I was provided a free print copy of this book from The Cadence Group on behalf of the author in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.