Damn fools make great protagonists, particularly in satirical novels. Their naïveté allows the reader to gain experience alongside them, and their cluelessness ensures that said experience will be funny as hell, too ... Refreshingly original. Here is an author capturing, with clarity, our current moment by flashing us back to the past. Dayle’s deft portrayal of American anti-Blackness, class exploitation and cultural uncertainty feels both accurate to the novel’s 19th-century setting and, soberingly, very contemporary.
The well-researched period details are occasionally juxtaposed with startling digressions, but the few anachronisms do not matter and are clearly intentional. This is not history as fact but history as fable. How To Dodge a Cannonball is satire at its funniest and most pointed, skewering good intentions and bad with equal ferocity.
