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For over three hundred years, that’s what the Hamilton family has called a shrinking swath of farmland in the Appalachian foothills of South Carolina.
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That’s the failing tobacco farm where Walter and Maggie Hamilton choose to raise their three children. Walter has big plans to make the farm more profitable, but his plans are interrupted by World War II and family heartbreak. Walter returns from the war a changed man and finds Maggie, too, has changed, neither of them for the better. But at least their family is together again at...
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More than anything, that’s where their eight-year-old son, Jimmy Hamilton, wants to be. However, after an unspeakable tragedy, he’s sent away from the only life he’s ever known to live with a kindly uncle in North Carolina.
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That’s where Jimmy is finally going to be, unless fate has plans of its own…
A Song that Never Ends is the first installment of the Hamilton Place series, an epic family saga extending from the Great Depression to present day. Through war and peace, love and loss, triumph and tragedy, follow the Hamilton family on their journey from a run-down farm in South Carolina, through the jungles of Vietnam, to the top of the world in New York City, and beyond the gardens of stone at Arlington.
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: While the focus of A Song That Never Ends is most clearly its large cast and worldly settings, the novel does weave together an epic tapestry of several generations of elders and children. It successfully uses repetition across geographic and temporal distance to highlight the ways in which harm is digested over the decades of a family.
Prose: Gibson’s novel employs an omniscient narration that artfully adjusts its tone according to the character and setting of any of its widely ranging scenes. Letters and telegrams are used to great, sparing effect.
Originality: The plot of A Song That Never Ends does build on the archetypes of the family epic and southern wartime forms but mainly does so through their combination rather than any original twists.
Character/Execution: With such a broad cast of characters, the novel understandably restricts its focus to revolve around two or so central characters in each generation. While this more obviously presents parallels and foils, the novel may have a stronger claim to its epic form with a wider-reaching focus.
Date Submitted: July 03, 2023
