What I’m Reading: The Ploughmen

I just finished up listening to the audio book The Ploughmen: A Novel Kim Zupan.  I picked this book as I was waiting for my hold books to become available and needed something to tide me over until one of them became available.  The cover looked promising…the description sounded promising.


The book wasn’t the best.Let me explain….
The story is a little too graphic for me.  Too many killings and killings for no reason.  There was a distance in the book.  I didn’t feel sympathetic towards any of the characters.  Admittedly, a day after I checked this book out and started listening, one of my books that was on hold became available.  I switched books without a thought and went to the other book.  Once that was done, I did come back and finish this one.  Had a different book been available, I don’t think I would have.

Here’s what Amazon had to say, “Steeped in the lonesome Montana country, unyielding as it is beautiful, The Ploughmen is the story of two men-an aging killer awaiting trial, and a troubled young deputy-who sit across from each other in the dark, talking through the bars of a county jail cell. John Gload is a killer so brutally adept at his craft that only now, at the age of 77, has he faced a long-term jail sentence. Valentine Millimaki, the low man in the Copper County sheriff’s department, is the unfortunate soul who draws the overnight shift after Gload’s arrest. Soon, though, the conversations between Gload and Millimaki grow familiar, and the troubled young sheriff finds himself seeking counsel from a man he’s sworn to keep behind bars, a man whose dark past shares something essential with his own. Zupan, also a carpenter, “writes with the precision of his trade” (The New York Times Book Review) and delivers a new classic of the American west.”

Amazon readers say 4.1 stars.  In my opinion, that was very generous.  I’d give it a 3.  I want to love a character in the book and I didn’t.  I want to feel like I am part of the book and didn’t.  Has anyone else read it??  I would love to know if anyone else has.

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