Rating: 
Summary: Compelling and with a acute sense of language
Review: This is an excellent book which reminded me of another one I found even more exciting called "The Marrow of Tradition" by Charles Chesnut, who wrote it a hundred years ago. It's another story of black/white relationships in the South that ends in a race riot. Another fierce song of pain is "Uncle Tom's Children", by Richard Wright. It's a shame these great books are shelved under the ghetto name of African-American literature; they should be placed in the same category as Joyce, Steinbeck, and Dostoyevsky, just as their authors surely intended.
Rating: 
Summary: An Ordeal....But Worth It
Review: I decided to read The Known World because I was told it was written with a very informative look towards slavery and offered many ideas not often covered in depth. Unfortunately undertaking the reading of this book started for me with difficulty. I could not grasp the author's writing style and I almost gave up several times in dissapointment. But thankfully I read on and towards the last 100 pages finally got involved. With so many characters to keep track of it would have helped to take notes in the beginning, especially since the author jumps about from time, character and place so often. The author's writing style distracted me from involvement with his characters until the end of the book. But most importantly I learned something new. The Known World expanded my own. Not only did I learn about other sides of slavery, I also learned how to read outside the norm and found myself involved in a facinating read.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling and thought provoking
Review: Much has already been said about the basic plot of this book, so I'd like to address the non-linear writing style...imagine yourself as a leaf tumbling down a stream, sometimes hurtling forward, yet frequently caught in little swirling eddies along the edges. If you relax and "go with the flow" rather than expecting this book to read as you would wish, you will find it to be an astounding and seductive experience on several levels. The viewpoint of this book is equally fluid; through some magic, Jones has you seeing life through the eyes of whatever character he's currently focused upon. There are terrible, ugly, beautiful, sad, heartwarming things that happen constantly throughout this book and somehow, you are always identifying through the protagonist of the moment, whether this be a slave or a slave patroller, frightening as that might be. There is no melodrama here. Somehow, everything is just taken for granted, assumed...it is, after all, their known world. And, for a brief time, ours as well. We eventually come to take it for granted. We can look back with the smugness of time and condemn slavery and its consequential perverse social structurings. Yet a book like this makes one question our own "known world," the social structures and cultural practices we take for granted and assume we are powerless to change. I wonder what our descendents will find equally perverse here...probably our oil addiction which forces us to attempt to control countries half-way around the world rather than simply learning to make do with less here at home.
Rating:
Summary: Knowing The Known World
Review: This is a wonderful, sad but essential book about the slave years around 1855 in Manchester County Virginia.
The story is woven like a handmade quilt telling of the past and future, the comings and going, the births and deaths of slaves, masters and free slave masters.
The characters seem eternal. Jones embeds information about their deaths in the middle of a scene from their lives. Even minor characters that are mentioned just once are given a detail of their lives to flesh them out.
The language is like poetry; the land one of the characters. 'The land seemed incapable of growing anything but sorrow.'
Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for this book. It should be required reading in high schools or college. I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and compelling
Review: Incredibly crafted and compelling, "The Known World" does a lot of things, but disappoint is not one of them. I was prepared to find just a "good story" when I purchased this book. What I got instead was a tour-de-force piece of literature. I agree with another reviewer in that Edward P. Jones is in the same league as Steinbeck or any of the other greats. The writing is beautiful and the story is one of the most unusual I've run across. So few books veer off the beaten path, but the few that do pack a wallop. Don't miss this one. Also recommended: THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD
Rating:
Summary: Open the Canon
Review: Outstanding. I, too, believed from the first word. Five weeks later, I finished this book. The conversation here, and the characters, bolted me in upright in aisle. The enormous depth of the text makes it imperative that one take his time. Jones' voice is as lucid, languid and comforting as that of any canonized author of an American letter. In his artful portrayal of what ranks amongst America's most forgotten and dismissed secrets, Jones added a whole new dimension-- a new world-- of thought in the process. I am affected by it, and I am still nearly speechless but the beauty of the work. Many thanks, Mr. Jones, for making the world a bit better and a bit more complete.
Rating:
Summary: More stars if possible
Review: Absolutely one of the most artfully crafted fiction books I've read in years. Incredible and deserves every award it has received. Bravo Mr. Jones and I hope you're hard at work on your next book.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Miss It!
Review: This book is rich in images and color. It gives a glimse of slavery that has been seldom portrayed and it will really make you think. The rich prose is filled with vivid descriptions that make this book hard to put down. Debbie Farmer, author of 'Don't Put Lipstick on the Cat'
Rating:
Summary: The Peculiar Institution
Review: The Known World feels like a book that took a long time to write. The writing proceeds at a slow but churning pace. Jones meticulously ties each character to one another, to the land, to the curious circumstances of the "peculiar institution" of slavery. We are taught in school that slavery was a black and white affair, but Jones takes great pains to describe a human landscape where such distinctions are blurry: the most powerful man in Manchester County, William Robbins, dotes upon the two children he has fathered with his slave, Philomena; Oden, the Indian, exaggerates his cruelty towards blacks to maintain his tenuous superiority; and Henry Townsend, the gifted young black man at the center of this novel, acquires a plantation full of slaves from which discord flows, imperceptibly at first. The lesson is the messiness of slavery made real by the vivid lives of each character. Over the course of the novel, Jones sketches out each character, from birth to death, using deft flashbacks and flash-forwards that are scattered throughout like crumbs and give the book a marvelous depth. In this sense, the book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book ends before the Civil War begins, and so the triumph of good over evil is not allowed to mitigate the brutal picture of slavery that Jones paints. Perhaps because it was so assiduously researched, this novel feels like history and it feels like life. Here's hoping that Jones' next one doesn't take ten years to write.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing characters, compelling plot
Review: With "The Known World," Edward Jones does a nice job of creating characters and a haunting setting that drive the story, rather than vice-versa. You're drawn into their world in an acutely visceral way. A dynamic debut from a writer with a bright future. If you're into writers like Jones, Michael Chabon, Norman Mailer, etc. (i.e., writers who weave jarring tales of oppression), then there's a new writer you should check out: Greg Ippolito. His new novel, "Zero Station," is absolutely terrific, and an excerpt is available for FREE. He's still a relative unknown (a friend turned me onto his work)...but this is a must-read. You can check him out and read the excerpt at: www.ZERO-STATION.net. Don't miss it!
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