Book review: Asa James, by Jodi Lew-Smith

Beautifully, lyrically written tale centering around the boy-who-grows-into-a-man, Asa, who never allowed his unusual physical appearance take the place of his soul, an insatiable thirst for learning, or the integrity by which he steers through a life of hard work, following dreams that a lesser person would have abandoned as impossible. The reader easily slips into the nineteenth century to walk among characters traced from the notes of literary history, as the plot inexorably unfolds with twists that are almost foreseeable, but not quite.
(Spoilers Below)

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You might imagine the author’s mind at work asking the questions, “what if Brontë wrote Rochester as a woman? What if Jane were an altogether different sort of person entirely, but with the same profound sense of self, grounded with an unalterable devotion to the truth? What if the story kept the darkness and forbidding landscape of the English moors and the ghostly stone, nooks and crannies of Thornfield Hall, but brought them across the sea to New England? What if all this was juxtaposed against the racial divide of the American Civil War? What if we paid homage to Bertha Mason’s home in the form of the incredibly lovely and diverse flora and fauna of the Caribbean, and our hero had a rightful reason to be there, as the realization of a lifelong dream? It all seems so incredibly crafty and creative and impossible to make believable literature, and yet Jodi Lew-Smith has done all this and more - with deft strokes she breathes emotion and color and life itself into each character so that you easily forget that there is a plot driving this tale, and simply live and breathe with them, savoring the discovery of each new chapter, each new experience, the love and terror and disappointment and disaster and ultimately, redemption seem fresh and real in spite of all of it.

Five well deserved stars, and I will look for more from this author.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.