A review by rglossner
The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis

3.0

Beautifully written family and coming of age story. The narrator relates his growing up in the strange, enormous house built into the mountain near a tiny North Carolina town. His father, who makes his living as a lawyer, is obsessed with books and literature and spends his nights drinking and writing a novel which is never finished. Tragedy splits his family and drives him away for college, and law school, where he meets a fellow law student named Story, with whom he falls in love. She has secrets and tragedies of her own. This novel was enjoyable, although I thought the women characters--his mother Eleonore, his sister Threnody, and Story--were all still mysteries to me at the end. Character and place take center stage here, so if you are looking for plot you will be disappointed.