Review: May the Road Rise Up to Meet You by Peter Troy
May the Road Rise Up to Meet You
by Peter Troy
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday
Publish Date: February 28, 2012
Format: Hardback | 400 pages
Rating: 4 of 5
In May the Road Rise Up to Meet You we encounter four remarkable characters in this memorable debut of historical fiction spanning the mid-nineteenth century through the end of the Civil War.
Ethan McOwen leaves Ireland in 1847 at the height of the famine and sails to America under squalid conditions joining his father and brother in New York. He becomes a successful photographer and volunteer in the Civil War with the Irish Brigade. Marcella Arroyo is a young Spanish woman whose wealthy family moves to America. She yearns to be independent and join the abolitionist movement as soon as she turns 21 and can move out of her parents home. Mary and Micah are slaves. While each has suffered harsh treatment in the past, Mary now has a better position as a house slave and companion for her owner’s daughter while Micah is considered a prize possession as a skilled carpenter and works long hours.
The four characters have parallel lives. Each is setting out on a journey, a new beginning, and along the way their stories intersect. Ethan has moved to American to escape the famine, Marcella begins anew when her family shuns her for leaving home, and Micha and Mary both experience being sold to new owners and separated from everything they have ever known. We learn their history and experience their present as the period comes alive with richly detailed descriptions. We feel the despair of a people suffering a famine, the grim conditions on a ship crossing the ocean, the harshness and pain of life as a slave, the horror of the Civil War battlefield and ultimately the beauty of love. There was much to like about each of these strong, complex characters.
The story is told in alternating points of view, rotating between the four main characters. The writing style took me a few chapters to get used to. There are no quotation marks around the dialog. Often the characters talk with a dialect. Occasionally the author slips into the second person and then seamlessly returns to third person the next time we read about that character. Different, but definitely worth the effort to read.
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The publisher has made available two copies for me to give to my readers in the US. For a chance to win, click here to enter. Giveaway ends March 11th, US only.
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Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Under My Apple Tree 
The lack of quotation marks usually bugs me, so I’ll have to think about this book.
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I though it was worth mentioning because it usually bugs me too. I kept going because the story was so good… and eventually I stopped noticing the lack of quotation marks.
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I agree, such a good book I didnt even notice!
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Leslie, I’m glad you enjoyed this book (in spite of the lack of quotation marks; I wonder why they were absent?). Thank you for hosting this giveaway.
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The lack of quotation marks would drive me nuts, but I bet if the story was good, I wouldn’t notice it for long. This book sounds fantastic! I’ve read about the famine once before in Mary Pat Kelly’s Galway Bay, which I loved.
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I did get used to it and it wasn’t a big problem, just odd. And every once in a while there would be a chapter that used quotations. Not sure if it will be that way in the final copy as I was reading a galley.
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I love the premise of the book, it reminds me a little of Away by Amy Bloom (Europe to USA, starting with nothing) although that is set much later.
Pretty please do ask your publishers next time whether they’d send internationally. I would love to win this book! 🙂 (I explicitly asked a few times, and sometimes the (USA) publishers are happy to send internationally in the event that a foreign reader would win).
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I will ask if that is a possibility.
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I enjoy books that have stories that intersect and I also enjoy Civil War stories. I’d love to read this!
Thank you for the giveaway!
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Really great book! I really enjoyed it. This acutally isn’t my tpyical genere, so I couldn’t believe how much it really pulled me in. I highly recommend it!!
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