{"id":1196,"date":"2009-06-06T09:45:40","date_gmt":"2009-06-06T09:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/wordpress\/?p=1196"},"modified":"2011-10-29T20:33:13","modified_gmt":"2011-10-30T01:33:13","slug":"fiction_city_of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2009\/06\/fiction_city_of.html","title":{"rendered":"Fiction: City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bought after reading about it at <a href=\"http:\/\/themorningnews.org\/tob\/2009\/unaccustomed-earth-vs-city-of.php\">the Tournament of Books<\/a> (where it made it to the <a href=\"http:\/\/themorningnews.org\/tob\/\">final round<\/a> but lost to Toni Morrison&#8217;s latest).<\/p>\n<p>There are really three storylines here:  Craig and his middle-class white family; SJ and his lower-class black family; and the historical facts of Hurricane Katrina.  They pretty much trade off chapters throughout and in the beginning of the book, I definitely found the &#8220;fact&#8221; chapters a bit distracting; taking me away from the action to just recite numbers.  But toward the end of the book, I found them a welcome emotional relief; a way to ground yourself in the reality of how many people this actually happened to.<\/p>\n<p>I thought it was a great book, perhaps made more weighty by being woven in to such a recent past.  The characters and their struggles with moving on vs turning back felt very real to me.<\/p>\n<p>Clearly Piazza loves New Orleans, and continues to struggle with the thought of his city in destruction.  Huffencoopers, have you read this yet?  I think you&#8217;d love it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bought after reading about it at the Tournament of Books (where it made it to the final round but lost to Toni Morrison&#8217;s latest). There are really three storylines here: Craig and his middle-class white family; SJ and his lower-class &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/archives\/2009\/06\/fiction_city_of.html\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,27,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-readin","category-recommending"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2350,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1196\/revisions\/2350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/crankymonkeybutt.com\/snip\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}