Karen Wheeling Reynolds

Maybe it's time for a law that you must be able to judge a book by its cover.

I say this because I'm very angry about this volume. On its cover it proudly proclaims itself a "North Carolina Society of Historians Award Winner." The title says "The Story Behind the Ballad." One of the blurbs says "a true telling of the lives and events of the legend of Tom Dooley."

Sure sounds like non-fiction, doesn't it?

Ha.

Get to the copyright page and you'll read that it's a work of "creative nonfiction based on local legend."

In other words, FICTION!

Memo to authors and publishers: Don't lie to me. Call fiction fiction. Historical fiction is a perfectly legitimate art form. (I think. Although every example I've ever read has been inaccurate.) But it is fiction. I bought this on the basis of being able to trust what it said. I can't. I can't use it as a reference anyway. The book has no index. Its only list of sources is a list of five books the author read, one of which (just to give you perspective) is The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Civil War. The only actual data in the book is some quotations from things said at Thomas Dula's murder trial. But all this material can be found in full rather than in excerpt in John Foster West's Lift Up Your Head Tom Dooley.

Understand that I can't give a useful review of this book as fiction. I don't read this kind of fiction. If you want "local color," this book may be for you -- the author tries hard to capture dialect and the like (e.g. calling Pauline Foster "Perline"). And apparently the author tried to be realistic. But I'd trust her a lot more if there were any reason to do so (footnotes, list of sources, chronology of verifiable events, anything). There is nothing.… (más)