Forgotten Roots – by Roger Whitten Barnes
Forgotten Roots is a ‘sort of’ murder mystery told through different timelines set in both the modern-day Canadian Province of Ontario and the area of Ohio and Ontario of the 1800’s. I liked the idea behind this story, but had issues following the three different storylines. For the first two thirds of the book, the storylines did not really mesh with each other and the time devoted to each was not evenly distributed. But for the last third of the story, they merged and flowed seamlessly with each other.
The book is basically about a woman finding out the history of her early colonial family when an old barn is demolished on her family property on St Joseph Island. That is one of the storylines. The other two are based two hundred years in the past and follow the lives of two people until they converge at one point on St Joseph Island.
I loved the descriptions of the Canadian wilderness and the historical backgrounds behind cities and settlements in Ohio – especially in the Cincinnati and Dayton areas. (I would never have thought that river piracy was a common crime along the Ohio River).
There are a few aspects of the modern storyline that I would have liked to have seen developed more. And in the early part of the novel I had a hard time reading through some of the storylines. There was too much time devoted to certain stories and that gave me a disconnect to what was happening in the others.
Overall, this was still a good novel and an entertaining way of learning a little about the early history of Ohio and Ontario.
-HMC
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