Jigsaw puzzle of a family history ... She channels grand speeches and on-the-ground reporting, she favors outrageous voices, and she resists hierarchy ... The beauty of the method is that authority remains plural and the tensions and alliances among the voices are visible at every step along the way. There is an ethics to Cockerell’s decision to withhold her own opinion ... Evocative power ... The result is a book that sings with narrative energy ... Disarming.
Dazzling ... Unlike anything I’ve ever read ... So overlooked and enticing is this historical episode that even a workaday writer could make hay with it, but Cockerell is not a workaday writer. In fact, on the evidence of Melting Point, it’s not clear whether to call her a writer at all, although her book does boast a lucid and compelling preface and afterword. In between, however, it is composed entirely of primary sources, which talk to, argue with, and jostle against one another without authorial interruption for three hundred and forty-five pages ... One inescapable lesson of Melting Point is that the past is always infinitely stranger and more interesting than we imagine; another is that, paradoxically, most of it is consigned with stunning rapidity to oblivion ... The technique turned translucent, leaving me staring directly into the story ... These voices are coaxed by Cockerell, who has a keen ear and fine sense of timing, into becoming some of recent literature’s most compelling narrators ... I wish that some wise friend or editor, on reading the first half of Melting Point, had told Cockerell to just keep following her ambitious beginning: a story that starts with Theodor Herzl wants to track the fate of his ideas clear through to the establishment of the State of Israel ... One can forgive almost any flaw in a book so doubly successful: its contents a resurrection, its form a revelation.
If the book has a limitation, it’s that the reader is left wondering what happened to the Galveston families; the documentary record is silent ... Nonetheless, Melting Point is a captivating exploration of identity and a search for belonging, a quest that reverberates into the present.
Formally ingenious ... Multi-voiced, and with a legion of different perspectives, the resulting book is wonderfully vital and idiosyncratic, a model of how history writing can be made fresh ... But if this book is not a perfectly structured whole, the sum of its parts adds up to an innovative and immediate account of a story that has world-historical significance.
The mission gets murkier at times when Cockerell stretches beyond the family history to address history with a capital H ... Cockerell’s unique approach raises questions about the role of the biographer or historian, grappling with sifting what’s important in an already selective record ... Her voice in the few pages we do get of it (preface, afterword, even the acknowledgments) is compelling. I look forward to seeing where curiosity will take this debut author next.
Seamless ... Cockerell uses her family history to frame a much broader narrative ... Cockerell tells the entire story through extracts from newspaper reports, letters, memoirs, documents and interviews. This is an ambitious and high-risk venture. The lack of authorial voice can lead to the story fragmenting and lacking narrative drive. Yet she pulls it off with verve.
Cockerell’s riveting and formally inventive narrative offers nothing less than an alternative history of the twentieth century, and of one of its most enduringly consequential movements ... The radical implications of Cockerell’s narrative sneak up on you. But they are likely to linger long after the last page has been read.
