Reuben and Rachel. A historian's worst nightmare.

Growing up,  my favorite genre in literature was historical fiction. I was enamored by the life styles of the past and the culture. As an adult I know that the past is glorified and is not as "beautiful" and "honorable" as I once believed. However, it was this early fascination with historical fiction that i am now working to become an history and English teacher. Due to this, I am someone who likes precision. I like seeing things in chronological order and I like having key figures to focus on. That being said, I am flexible if a work is chaotic but shows who a person is and creates greater understanding, (Benjy's section from the Sound and the Fury is one of my all time favorite excerpts from a novel).  So imagine my frustration when I read both parts of Reuben and Rachel. There was not one key character but dozens who I did not really care about. I could not connect to any of them in part one and had to reread parts in order to focus on who was the next person in the line of Columbus. It's not like The Killer Angels (Civil War novel) where they announce their change in perspectives in order to show different POVs of the battle of Gettysburg. Yes it helped show the struggles of life and shows lineage but the format was so frustrating I just hated it. To think, this was my favorite part of the book. Part two was just a train wreck. I cannot even believe how scattered it was. At least in book one time was linear. I like time lines and knowing what is going on. I was just so confused and when I get annoyed I tend to quit reading. There was nothing that kept me pulled into the book so I ended up skimming it just to get through the awfulness of it. This isn't even me talking about the blatant bias that leads to historical inaccuracies, but I will use that in an entirely different post.