{"id":1672,"date":"2016-05-16T16:19:59","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T23:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1672"},"modified":"2017-12-18T08:30:59","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T16:31:00","slug":"review-midnight-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil-a-savannah-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/16\/review-midnight-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil-a-savannah-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Midnight<\/a>
\n Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story<\/a> by John Berendt<\/a>
\n My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

I read this book. I\u2019m not sure what else to say. I didn\u2019t find it as fascinating as I\u2019d hoped. But it wasn\u2019t bad. This is all so vague, and I apologize for that: I feel that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil<\/em> was a book that straddled too many tonal fences and in the end there\u2019s not much to say about.<\/p>\n

But I am a loquacious little keyboard pounder, so I\u2019ll manage.<\/p>\n

I read a free sample on my e-reader and decided I liked it enough but wanted to get it from the library instead of purchasing it. For two weeks the opening, with the narrator interviewing Jim Williams, only to be interrupted by Billy Hanson, stayed with me. Of course, I\u2019d already seen the movie, so what stayed with me was Kevin Spacey, Jude Law, and John Cusack.<\/p>\n

Once I got the whole book to myself, I found I didn\u2019t know what I was reading. Was this a biography, a murder mystery, a court-room drama, a memoir, a travel-guide? The movie, at least, settled on a story. The book did not.<\/p>\n

I know it\u2019s usually pointless to compare the book to the movie, as one might as well compare apples to horseshoes. They often serve entirely different purposes. But I can\u2019t help but think that, having seen the movie, I was better equipped to make it through the book. I was able to give the various characters some measure of motive and personality, that I did not otherwise see in the book.<\/p>\n

Although, let me clear, there are some very interesting characters. Joe Odom, Minerva, and of course, The Lady Chablis, to name a few. But they\u2019re side characters, and have no bearing on the \u201cplot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Midnight in the Garden of Evil<\/em> is considered a \u201cnon-fiction novel\u201d (ala Truman Capote and Norman Mailer,\u201d and has won awards. That\u2019s all well and good. For me, this amounted to an amusing beach read, and nothing more. Which is not a bad thing at all.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt My rating: 3 of 5 stars I read this book. I\u2019m not sure what else to say. I didn\u2019t find it as fascinating as I\u2019d hoped. But it wasn\u2019t bad. This is all so vague, and I apologize for that: I … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-qY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1673,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions\/1673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}