Review: Truth Be Found in Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 30, 2012
There are two types of books. There are TELL books, which fill you with information and there are SHOW books which take you through the story making you experience the heat, see the room, hear the sounds of the scenario and feel the main character's pain. All five senses become alert.The Dancing Boy is a Show and Tell book.Roy E. Stolworthy introduced me to the life of a man named Gillet and let me feel the longing he had for his former wholeness as a man before he was a soldier in a war he hated. His writing style is clearly distinctive, making you forget you're reading a book.Stolworthy takes you to the Middle East describing the conditions and way of life I never imagined possible, and yet this story makes my life seem like a fragile gift, given the possibilities. His writing style is also refreshing. I mostly enjoyed feeling sensation from the wind that "came softly over tree tops" and saw the "yellow moon that climbed and hovered overhead and shadows that moved and crept like living things." Roy Stolworthy lets you hear whisperings in the tall pines with graceful clarity as it delights and feeds your poetic need. Writings that will rank very high on the literary scale because of the way he strings words together describing such things as dawn."Dawn arrived on time, its gouging fingers greedily seeking every crevice to chase away the shadows and worm out all that remained of unwanted darkness."This author makes writings that describe nature seem simple to write. "Overhead the stars appeared like a host of illuminated raindrops, waiting to fall to earth to form glittering puddles." If this book were not able to capture the story of a veteran of hellish war, a young boy reluctant to understand his liberator, now a hostage himself, and a regime of abusers from a world of hatred and hypocrisy, it would be a book of poetry. However, this author manages to combine the two with ease, while he reminds us that war is business, and business is good.While I wished for a sappy ending, I visualized long lines of movie buffs gnawing at the bit to see this book come to life in Technicolor with Clint Eastward playing Gillet. Keeping my interest Stolworthy moves the story from the United Kingdom to Afghanistan and back again while his main character's plan to save a young boy from the sex slave status in Afghanistan remains more than challenging. The Dancing Boy captures your sympathy not only for the boy, but for Gillette, and I dare say, for the bad guys who are selling him out to save their own skin while they compromise Allah, a character in this book that Gillet doesn't like. You get the feeling if Allah materialized and spoke to Gillet about the conduct of a certain sect of Muslims, he would face him off and say, "Allah, that's not negotiable nor is it up for debate! Beat it!" Gillet is a man of ambiguity, but his crusty natural dignity does not puzzle the reader. When his own young son Luke becomes part of the quandary and the political vermin asks him for a ransom he was not sure he could pay, his struggles truly began.The author captures the division in Gillet's mind and holds you in the cavity between his sanity and insanity. Smooth descriptions of PTSD weave in and out of the story and the shockers in between the pages forbid you to put the book down. An unexpected ending of this book makes you glad you didn't.