...Dawson’s Fall is both rooted in its time and speaks directly to ours. It is also a moving love story between two people whose morality seems, from the perspective of 2019, sometimes to be muddied ... the book has an epic sweep. But it’s also grounded: Robinson vividly evokes settings in just a few sentences ... Here Robinson has pieced together a century-old true crime, a murder in which all the witnesses are long dead. Using far-flung sources and excruciating care, she creates the map; her novelist’s skills render it in 3-D ... the legacy of slavery and the Civil War is still being felt by our nation. Dawson’s Fall is a richly envisioned attempt to reconcile with that troubled history.
Sarah is a talented writer all-too-aware of women’s social inferiority ... While the patchwork approach means the narrative isn’t exactly smooth, it proves unyielding and compelling in its timely themes, with many depictions of how white men’s seething resentment erupts into racist violence and how Southern codes of honor and toxic values, particularly slavery, corroded individual lives and the national character.
Part history, part family saga, the book peers into the cauldron of race as it simmered and flared during Reconstruction in the South ... A fascinating read, Dawson’s Fall illuminates the destructive antecedents some 150 years ago of racial tensions that remain with us today. I wished, at times, that Robinson had hewed a little less closely to fact. More invention might have given some scenes a harder edge, underlining what was so deeply at risk in the decades after the Civil War. That said, Dawson’s Fall pointedly makes the case that principles matter.
... much more than just a simple romance. Taken as a whole, the couple’s story reads as a reflection of America in the years after the Civil War, defined by reinvention, race, and the ideal of honor ... If there’s a criticism to be found in this book, it’s in the rambling nature of the first half. Perhaps the changing time periods are necessary to set the stage for the action to follow, but they make the novel hard to follow at points. It grows much stronger toward the end, when the focus is on the central timeline ... a thoroughly enjoyable read, and Robinson does a wonderful job of telling the story of two enterprising and courageous people who are nevertheless not in total control of their circumstances. Her real victory is in engaging us with historical people and in drawing parallels between their lives and the life of America at the time. This may not be beach reading, but it is worth the purchase to add balance to the lighter fare in which we sometimes indulge.
The interspersed family letters and newspaper articles, while intriguing, seem spliced rather than woven into a narrative that leaps by years before settling ... But Robinson’s descriptive and imaginative prose sings; this book is a startling reminder of the immoral and lasting brutality visited on the South by the institution of slavery.
Such plotlines could easily regress into a lurid, exploitative tale...but Robinson handles the material judiciously, using the Dawsons’ lives as points in a larger map of civic dysfunction. (She integrates contemporary news stories of murders between chapters to evoke a wider atmosphere of unease.) Robinson suggests that bigotry has trickle-down effects in terms of race, gender, and everyday conduct. All this converges in a climax that's surprising but, given Robinson’s careful integration of history and imagination, feels inevitable. A stylish and contemplative historical novel, considerate of facts but not burdened by them.
