First, know that Down Where My Love Lives is a compilation of two novels, The Dead Don’t Dance (Awakening Series #1)
and Maggie (Awakening Series #2). Also The Dead Don’t Dance was the first book Charles Martin published. I read these within a couple weeks of reading Where the River Ends, an excellent novel with many of the same themes. Unfortunately Down Where My Love Lives felt like the rough draft.
Many reviewers describe Martin’s writings as sentimental, but I don’t agree with that assessment. Martin includes emotion and he writes about love as the center point and reason for being. Unfortunately this duology has a big dose of melodrama, but it is still good enough to be an enjoyable read.
The Dead Don’t Dance Book 1
The Dead Don’t Dance starts out with Dylan and Maggie, married for just a couple of years, expecting their first child. Maggie seems compulsive, unrealistic and controlling, and Dylan’s devotion to her was puzzling. She sure wouldn’t be my first choice of a spouse.
Dylan farms a large plot in South Carolina that he inherited from his grandparents, but they live on only $20,000 a year. Maggie spent several hundred on nice-but-not-essential baby things at the local baby store, far more than Dylan could afford, and freaked out when she found a black hair growing on her chin.
Their son is stillborn and Maggie hemorrhages and goes into a coma. The novel alternates flashbacks to Dylan’s life before and with Maggie with his response to her long coma. In the meantime Dylan starts a new job teaching English at the community college (which Maggie applied for unbeknownst to Dylan), delivers Amanda’s baby in the freezing rain, tries to make friends with Maggie’s pet pig Pinky, and tends Maggie every day. He lets his farm go and loses his crop.
Throughout we see Dylan through his thoughts and actions and how others respond to him. He is deeply committed to his wife, overall kind and thoughtful, caring, not terribly interested in money or worldly success. He’s the type of guy you want to know and be friends with.
The exception was the episode that seemed completely pointless, cruel and had no place in the book, the raccoon hunt. Raccoons can be vicious and pests in a city but the hunters went into a wild swamp to hunt the coons. The raccoon in the swamp was surely no threat or pest. Martin describes how Amos shot the coon – deliberately NOT killing it – so that it fell down through many feet of branches to get attacked and and eaten while alive by the coon dogs. I don’t have a problem with hunting animals you plan to eat or to remove pests like the bazillion rabbits in our area, but first why would they hunt a wild raccoon they don’t plan to eat and second, why deliberately be that cruel? And what was the possible reason to include this in the novel? It gave no insight to Dylan or his friends except to make me dislike the bunch.
The Dead Don’t Dance was overall mediocre and had I read it before others by Charles Martin I would not have pursued any more of his novels. It was OK at best.
Maggie
Martin wrote a sequel that picks up 17 months later, after Maggie awakens from her coma. Dylan experienced serious emotional events while she was in the coma and finds it very hard to tell Maggie about them, partly because he doesn’t want to make her feel even worse than she already does about their stillborn child. This part of the novel felt authentic to me.
Maggie had an intricate and ridiculous plot, picked up the story of Dylan’s love for Maggie and threw in the complication that Maggie may be unable to carry a child to term. Oh, and throw in the fact that Dylan’s best friend and across-the-street neighbor married Amanda whose father’s enemies – former partners in crime – are after him and everyone close to him. That leads to kidnapping Amanda, torching Dylan’s house, killing his dog, assaulting Maggie, burning down the father’s church.
The book is overly complex. Dylan and Maggie need to get acquainted in some sense; Dylan lived 4 months alone, buried their son alone, dealt with a new job alone. Maggie missed all that and woke up with the fear for her child top of her mind.
Maggie gets pregnant but miscarries and she and Dylan decide to adopt. However the agency looks askew at their finances, overall life style (truck instead of a mini van) and mostly at Maggie’s emotional health. Dylan takes steps to become acceptable to them, borrowing $40,000 to finance the adoption, trading in his truck for a van, but Maggie is oblivious to the problems.
Now add the neighbor and best friend, Amos, whose father-in-law gave evidence that put his former partners in prison for years. Those creeps are violent and want to destroy the father-in-law, his entire family, and for some reason, Dylan too.
The last plot point is about Bryce, a former US marine who is rich but lives in a trailer in a closed drive in movie theater. Bryce is generous with time and money and likes Dylan and Maggie, and in return they take care of him to the extent he allows it. The twist in Maggie is that Bryce changed; he is bathed, trailer picked up and repaired, he is back in shape. Someone from the military comes to advise Bryce’s financial adviser and Dylan to keep away from him, that Bryce could snap.
Just like the first book, Dylan is interesting, someone you want to know. Maggie seems selfish and controlling. Amos is a great guy, Amanda too good to be true. Characters are partially developed, not complete people.
Summary
Charles Martin shows flashes of the good writer he later proves to be. He writes of the most ghastly places imaginable, swamps, South Carolina farms with swarms of mosquitoes, places where a “cool” evening is 78 degrees, and makes them almost seem desirable. He emphasizes the heat and mugginess and bugs, that summer last 6 months or more, but you can tell that he loves it. It’s home. All of his books are set in these horrible places.
He writes of love, especially the committed love of true marriage, but from the husband’s perspective. Most romance books are from the wife’s point of view and it is lovely to see a man confessing his love.
He used some similar elements in Maggie as in Where the River Ends. Both have a sick wife, a disparate couple, committed marriage, no children, icky hot muggy swampy southern setting, lots of emotion. In fact Martin uses the term “indomitable” to describe both Maggie and Abbie in Where the River Ends. Martin learned to tidy up his plots and show his characters far better by the time he wrote Where the River Ends.
Overall I’d give this 2 or 3 stars. A mediocre but tolerable first novel, ragged around the edges and not a good introduction to an excellent author.
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