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.
