Ewer’s Rock, Virginia, 1917. Roy Young is restless, eager to leave this isolated rural valley for university and return with the technical knowledge to modernize his family’s farm and bring them properly into the twentieth century. Samantha Hatton, the minister’s daughter and Roy’s best friend since childhood, knows that both Roy and the town expect them to marry. But Samantha, a daring and ambitious young woman, hungers for more. Above them on the mountain, tending to a lost herd of cattle, is silent Ennis Duke, the mysterious wild boy whose arrival in the valley will upend Ewer’s Rock’s understanding of itself and its place in the world. Within a year, the lives of these three young people will be dramatically transformed.
Powers is a tremendously gifted writer. He has an amazing knack for storytelling that seems to unfold visually and conveys landscapes, gestures and complex military engagements with great flair. His economical prose makes brisk work of a gripping tale ... Yet his desire to make the story resonate at an epic level also makes parts of the novel melodramatic and implausible ... There’s also something uncomfortable about the book’s representation of violence ... Though I enjoyed the book a great deal and admired Powers’s bravura, economical prose, I ended up comparing it to other books about the same conflict.
Powers unspools Samantha, Roy and Ennis’ story poetically, and though the pace is perhaps too slow at times, he is adept at building tension and heightening emotion. Like his previous novels The Yellow Birds and A Shout in the Ruins, Children of the Wild is propelled by his ability to make the reader inhabit the intensity of war and the bonds it forges. Powers imbues even small objects and moments with poignant significance.
Skillfully weaves threads of love, friendship, and senseless death into a compelling and often emotional tale where the price of love is paid with sorrow ... A deeply affecting novel.
