The Indigo Girl
By Natasha Boyd This novel is popular with book clubs. I write that as both a good recommendation, and a negative one. The good is that the story is well-crafted, generally well-written, and it incorporates information and concepts that aren't part of everyday experience. Without a doubt, "learning" through reading fiction is a bonus. The bad is that the writer adopts a few themes that readers will know sometimes challenge my tolerance. One of my peeves is first person narration, which in and of itself isn't wrong , though perhaps overdone in modern fiction. My biggest objection to it is that, lacking an omniscient narrator, we seldom see the main character with any objectivity, and that can reduce the complexity of all the characters. We're seeing through the eyes of one individual, and hearing that "voice" only. The story is about a very young, though marriageable-age girl, Eliza Lucas, a real person who lived in the 1700s in North Carolina. The famil...
