Official Review: Cold Comfort, Ill Wind by Lee Passarella

artemis822 · Post by **artemis822** » 09 Jun 2016, 16:53

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Cold Comfort, Ill Wind" by Lee Passarella.]

2 out of 4 stars

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Two brothers on opposite American Civil War battlefields are at the center of this historical dramatization by Lee Passarella. Right off the bat, I will tell you that I give this book 2 out of 4 stars. Told in third person, it follows a handful of characters on their journey through the various skirmishes between Blue and Gray troops in the South. Cold Comfort, Ill Wind attempts to entrench us in the mud and mire of one of our country's darkest chapters.

The journey of the Phillips brothers, John Tyler after he spends recovery time at his aunt's house in order to forgo the extended travel to the military hospital and risk the loss of his life, and Townsend, also referred to as 'Monk', a drummer in one of the Virginia regiments has the potential for heartbreaking misery, to provide more empathy to the Confederate soldiers that fought, the average man that held no slaves but were willing to stand with their neighbors in what they might have seen as a violation of their rights. Those that didn't support slavery, but disagreed with what they saw as intimidation and bullying tactics. John and Monk have the potential to flesh out the opposing side, as people to be listened to, rather than caricatures to be vilified. They are the untold stories, not the brothers divided by philosophy, but by geography and the dangerous circumstances in which they carried out their duty.

I can only applaud the author for the level of research required to ground the reader in the battlefields long buried and forgotten in our history, and make the information feel new, as if it is a forgotten chapter that most of those outside of history majors would not have covered in school. However, the particular format through which the tale is told is too unfocused for a fictional history. There are mass info dumps, unsubtle and too concentrated to be useful.

I do not lack imagination by any means, but the reader is given little to ground our mindscape in as we follow troop movements from one event to the next. We are told far too much and not shown enough. If this had been done as a screenplay, the shifting focuses of character views might be less confusing and more useful to readers. It is hard to see the details when you are given the wide picture as your focus. I give this 2 stars out of 4 for the level of coherence required to track so much information and shape it into a fictitious telling. I cannot manage to give 3 stars out of 4, as for a story dedicated to war, I felt little urgency and no emotional investment in the events. Despite the distance in time and cultural values, there shouldn't be a detachment from what is going on. The potential remains in this story to be told, but maybe combining the two books wasn't the best way to tell it.

For a story that is supposed to be told by the lower enlisted, far too much emphasis is given on what Generals were doing, knew, or learned. It is one thing to be given information regarding the top of the chain of command by the officers in question, an occasion that would be expected to be few and far between. It is another for the dissemination of information to come through your immediate chain of command, squad leaders or company commanders. As an Army veteran, I can count on one hand how many times my proximity came to anyone of the rank of General of any standing, and so such frequent exposure to someone of that level between lower enlisted and upper echelon officers doesn't sit right with me story wise. We had constant re-enforcement about fraternization among the ranks. This is a soldier's story, one that doesn't often get told, how they can be swept up in events and orders, a riptide of history's current that may land you on the wrong moral shore in absentia. The vessel of duty may only carry you so far before it gets overturned.

******
Cold Comfort, Ill Wind
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