A Shout in the Ruins

An Amazon Best Book of May 2018: Kevin Powers’ 2012 debut The Yellow Birds was a compact novel based loosely on his experiences as a soldier in Iraq, and it put him on a short list of talented new writers to watch. In this sophomore effort, A Shout in the Ruins, Powers has written another compact work, albeit one that introduces more characters and spans over 100 years. It opens during the Civil War, on the Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond and examines the fates of those living on the plantation, white and black, through roughly a century. The south has a history built on violence and displacement, as does the country as a whole, and Powers is asking what that means for us, the people who have inherited that history. With its scope, themes, and careful attention to language, A Shout in the Ruins is a highly ambitious novel. You read the book as much to get lost in the words, in the voice and richness of description, as you do for the story; and while it may not hit every mark, it succeeds in its attempt to reach farther and higher than most. – Chris Schluep