Review of Colors
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Audrey L 1
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Review of Colors
[Following is a volunteer review of "Colors" by Samuel J Murray.]
Colors: Tenements to Tammany An Irish Immigrant’s Tale by Samuel J. Murray
In Colors: Tenements to Tammany An Irish Immigrant’s Tale by Samuel J. Murray, Murray uses information gleaned from public and family records and censuses to tell the fascinating stories of his own Scottish and Irish immigrant forebears as if in their own voices. In addition to providing insight to the characters’ lives and struggles, an ongoing theme throughout Colors is the mysterious disappearance of husband and father William Murray in the mid-1800s.
Despite the fact that all of the characters in Colors are closely connected to or a part of the Murray family, their stories are spread out across a wide timeframe and provide insight into a variety of different professions, including a Union soldier, factory and dock workers, an inventor, and a politician. Where the characters’ stories do overlap, Murray employs his knowledge of the characters’ varied life experiences to inform his storytelling and ensure that the overlap does not come across as repetitive. In using this knowledge about his forbears’ lives to emphasize their different opinions and points of view, Murray immerses the reader in the story and invests them more deeply in the success and happiness of individual characters, as well as successfully stirring up interest in the ongoing mystery of what really happened to William Murray.
Although I greatly enjoyed the premise of Colors, the book has a multitude of spelling and grammatical errors, including misspellings of common words and phrases, unnecessary capitalization or the lack of capitalization, sudden, unexplained shifts in perspective, and sentences that are missing words or spaces between words. These errors do not seem intentional, as they add nothing to the characters’ dialog and, in my experience, diminish the reader’s overall ability to understand the book. Colors also contains many formatting errors. In multiple places throughout the book, sentences are divided into two or more segments with a full empty line between the segments. There are also multiple cases in which paragraphs and full pages are repeated. These formatting errors, which admittedly may not extend to the print version of the book, are significant and also make the book difficult to follow.
Murray’s effort in researching his forbears’ lives shines through in his writing. The characters’ stories are written in first-person perspective, and each character’s “voice” is unique and helps reflect that character’s personality. However, Colors does not appear to have been professionally edited; the many spelling, grammatical, and formatting issues found throughout Colors are distracting and make the writing difficult to follow. For these reasons, I give Colors a rating of 2 out of 4 stars.
Content warnings for Colors include child and infant death, domestic abuse, neglect, substance abuse, substance addiction, and violence. I would recommend this book to readers of historical fiction and those who enjoy genealogy.
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Colors
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Colors: Tenements to Tammany An Irish Immigrant’s Tale by Samuel J. Murray
In Colors: Tenements to Tammany An Irish Immigrant’s Tale by Samuel J. Murray, Murray uses information gleaned from public and family records and censuses to tell the fascinating stories of his own Scottish and Irish immigrant forebears as if in their own voices. In addition to providing insight to the characters’ lives and struggles, an ongoing theme throughout Colors is the mysterious disappearance of husband and father William Murray in the mid-1800s.
Despite the fact that all of the characters in Colors are closely connected to or a part of the Murray family, their stories are spread out across a wide timeframe and provide insight into a variety of different professions, including a Union soldier, factory and dock workers, an inventor, and a politician. Where the characters’ stories do overlap, Murray employs his knowledge of the characters’ varied life experiences to inform his storytelling and ensure that the overlap does not come across as repetitive. In using this knowledge about his forbears’ lives to emphasize their different opinions and points of view, Murray immerses the reader in the story and invests them more deeply in the success and happiness of individual characters, as well as successfully stirring up interest in the ongoing mystery of what really happened to William Murray.
Although I greatly enjoyed the premise of Colors, the book has a multitude of spelling and grammatical errors, including misspellings of common words and phrases, unnecessary capitalization or the lack of capitalization, sudden, unexplained shifts in perspective, and sentences that are missing words or spaces between words. These errors do not seem intentional, as they add nothing to the characters’ dialog and, in my experience, diminish the reader’s overall ability to understand the book. Colors also contains many formatting errors. In multiple places throughout the book, sentences are divided into two or more segments with a full empty line between the segments. There are also multiple cases in which paragraphs and full pages are repeated. These formatting errors, which admittedly may not extend to the print version of the book, are significant and also make the book difficult to follow.
Murray’s effort in researching his forbears’ lives shines through in his writing. The characters’ stories are written in first-person perspective, and each character’s “voice” is unique and helps reflect that character’s personality. However, Colors does not appear to have been professionally edited; the many spelling, grammatical, and formatting issues found throughout Colors are distracting and make the writing difficult to follow. For these reasons, I give Colors a rating of 2 out of 4 stars.
Content warnings for Colors include child and infant death, domestic abuse, neglect, substance abuse, substance addiction, and violence. I would recommend this book to readers of historical fiction and those who enjoy genealogy.
******
Colors
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Latest Review: The Curious Spell of Madam Genova by J.G. Schwartz
