Review: Wonderfully descriptive phraseology
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 24, 2013
Upon reading the opening pages of the book, a reader is transported immediately to Wales in the late 1800s.I was unfamiliar with this author and became entranced by his use of language---whether it was elegant prose or his tutorial on dam-building.Some of the examples I enjoyed included:"The mouth, just another severe line in a face of severe lines""Pick[axe]s rippling down the line like a centipede in motion""[A ] cloud of persistent flies, maddeningly obsessed with his ears"Once Americans sort through British spelling variants (and adapt to slews of Welsh consonants which LOOK like typos---such as Cwm-hir;Pen-y-bwlch; Nyth-y-gog;Llywelyn, etc.), they should rejoice because it was [Hallelujah!!] a typo-free text.Author Reid did a nice job of building tension throughout, and the characters were well developed---including some real baddies.I found it an unlikely forum for all the ornithology, poetry references and poetic way of drawing word pictures, but appreciated them wholeheartedly.