Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns by Donald Harington

This was definitely an interesting read - worth the $1.99 from the Kindle cheap books of the month list. Probably worth it to the author as well, because at some point I am going to find and read some of his novels.

City rather defies conventional categories. On one level it is simply a story a woman's search for the history and characters of some of the "lost" cities of Arkansas. Lost cities in this context are places named City which never achieved that status and are now near or actual ghost towns. It is by this nature episodic and the center becomes Kim, the eighth grade civics teacher making the quest. There is also her fascination with "the writer" that she has corresponded with and is an absent partner in the venture.

So, we have a historical research driven narrative which suddenly goes totally off the rails with what is an apparently completely fictional narrative of a paroled Union soldier headed home after the civil war. This is embedded in the true story of an overloaded steamboat, the Sultana, carrying, in addition to the paying passengers, a couple thousand soldiers from two of the most notorious Confederate prisoner camps, Andersonville and Catawba. The boilers explode and and an indefinite number of people are killed; most estimates place the number of dead higher than the number that died in the sinking of the Titanic. I kept waiting for Kim to locate descendants of the man - but the story was just dropped.

The wrap is the actual romance of Kim and the writer, none other than (surprise, surprise) Donald Harington himself. Actually, it isn't a surprise at all - if you read prologues - because he telegraphs it pretty clearly there.

They finish up with a list of lost cities of the United States - state by state. So naturally I had to check out what they had listed for New Mexico. I had only heard of one of them, and that caused me some concern about their list as a whole. They listed Silver City - if Silver City is a ghost town, there are any number of well-populated places in this state which qualify.