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geve_'s review
3.0
This book tells of the disaster that occurred during a crowded boarding of the Bar Harbor Ferry. It reviews everyone involved, how the gangplank was built and collapsed, what Maine was like at the time, and generally how life was for the people traveling for a weekend at Bar Harbor to check out some war ships.
This book was clearly written for a very local audience. It tells in detail where every single person is from, where every building is, how everyone traveled to the ferry, down to the street address of the Portland paper that was reporting on this incident. I think if you're not from this area, these details would not be particularly interesting, and they add nothing to the telling other than local interest (given that the author has several other maine specific books, that's seems intentional). These details were mostly boring, but I just skimmed past most of them after a while. The other major issue is how repetitive the book is. Regularly there are sentences repeated in consecutive paragraphs, sometimes with little changed between them. Sometimes it felt like it just needed more editing, at other times I was actually confused about if it was actually repeated info or completely new people with the same name (using only first or only last names often, and the names were all very similar).
Even chapter to chapter there was a ton repeated. There were times an earlier chapter explains something, then later directly quotes the exact articles the author likely used to write from previously. Felt like this book could have been a long article and been just as good, but was dragged out via word count padding.
All that said, this is a small publisher and a local author, so it's not like they probably had a bunch of staff editors to polish this. It was totally fine.
This was an interesting event, told in a slightly dry way, and the writing and format did detract from it for me. That said, I still enjoyed it. There were parts I would normally have been bored to tears by, that I found charming here. For example, the author chose to tell what the Bar Harbor resort had on menu for the summer, and though that's a totally unrelated and kinda boring detail, I actually enjoyed it and felt it added to the atmosphere of the book. Kinda fun to imagine the way it was, summertime in Maine at the end of the 19th century, and the author captured a lot of that vibe.
Would recommend for people visiting or sitting at camp/beach in summer and just wanna read a little local flavor. Also for people with particular interest in this specific event or area.
This book was clearly written for a very local audience. It tells in detail where every single person is from, where every building is, how everyone traveled to the ferry, down to the street address of the Portland paper that was reporting on this incident. I think if you're not from this area, these details would not be particularly interesting, and they add nothing to the telling other than local interest (given that the author has several other maine specific books, that's seems intentional). These details were mostly boring, but I just skimmed past most of them after a while. The other major issue is how repetitive the book is. Regularly there are sentences repeated in consecutive paragraphs, sometimes with little changed between them. Sometimes it felt like it just needed more editing, at other times I was actually confused about if it was actually repeated info or completely new people with the same name (using only first or only last names often, and the names were all very similar).
Even chapter to chapter there was a ton repeated. There were times an earlier chapter explains something, then later directly quotes the exact articles the author likely used to write from previously. Felt like this book could have been a long article and been just as good, but was dragged out via word count padding.
All that said, this is a small publisher and a local author, so it's not like they probably had a bunch of staff editors to polish this. It was totally fine.
This was an interesting event, told in a slightly dry way, and the writing and format did detract from it for me. That said, I still enjoyed it. There were parts I would normally have been bored to tears by, that I found charming here. For example, the author chose to tell what the Bar Harbor resort had on menu for the summer, and though that's a totally unrelated and kinda boring detail, I actually enjoyed it and felt it added to the atmosphere of the book. Kinda fun to imagine the way it was, summertime in Maine at the end of the 19th century, and the author captured a lot of that vibe.
Would recommend for people visiting or sitting at camp/beach in summer and just wanna read a little local flavor. Also for people with particular interest in this specific event or area.
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