The Cutting Season

A Novel

By: Attica Locke

Narrated by: Quincy Tyler Bernstine

Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

In Black Water Rising, Attica Locke delivered one of the most stunning and sure-handed fiction debuts in recent memory, garnering effusive critical praise, several award nominations, and passionate reader response. Now Locke returns with The Cutting Season, a riveting thriller that intertwines two murders separated across more than a century.

Caren Gray manages Belle Vie, a sprawling antebellum plantation that sits between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the past and the present coexist uneasily. The estate's owners have turned the place into an eerie tourist attraction, complete with full-dress re-enactments and carefully restored slave quarters. Outside the gates, a corporation with ambitious plans has been busy snapping up land from struggling families who have been growing sugar cane for generations, and now replacing local employees with illegal laborers. Tensions mount when the body of a female migrant worker is found in a shallow grave on the edge of the property, her throat cut clean.

As the investigation gets under way, the list of suspects grows. But when fresh evidence comes to light and the sheriff's department zeros in on a person of interest, Caren has a bad feeling that the police are chasing the wrong leads. Putting herself at risk, she ventures into dangerous territory as she unearths startling new facts about a very old mystery - the long-ago disappearance of a former slave - that has unsettling ties to the current murder. In pursuit of the truth about Belle Vie's history and her own, Caren discovers secrets about both cases - ones that an increasingly desperate killer will stop at nothing to keep buried.

Taut, hauntingly resonant, and beautifully written, The Cutting Season is at once a thoughtful meditation on how America reckons its past with its future, and a high-octane pause resister that unfolds with tremendous skill and vision. With her rare gift for depicting human nature in all its complexities, Attica Locke demonstrates once again that she is "destined for literary stardom" (Dallas Morning News).

©2012 Attica Locke (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers

Lackluster second novel

After enjoying Attica Locke's first novel, Black Water Rising, I expected another fast-paced, tense, and action-filled story. The Cutting Season was a disappointment in all three areas. Aside from the finding of a body in a shallow grave, everything else in the first 3/4 of the book seemed like background or side-story. Very little happened to advance the plot.

As I started to listen, I groaned aloud at the narrator's voice. She sounded like a cranky child. But within a few minutes I got used to her, and appreciated her clear diction and the appropriate emotional content of her reading. Quincy Tyler Bernstine's narration actually improved the story.

A romantic scene seemed to be added for no purpose at all; it gave little insight into the characters beyond making me like them a bit less for their questionable encounter. As with much of the text, it had nothing to do with the plot.

I have already recommended Black Water Rising to many friends, and will continue to do so, but I've also started adding "but avoid Locke's second book."

Well done!

The narration was excellent! I enjoyed the storyline and the plot. The characters were fully formed. It was as if I could see them.

Mystery + Atmosphere = A Definite Winner!

"For a lot of people .... it's complicated," says Caren Grey, a Southern African-American woman who manages the sugar plantation in Louisiana where her ancestors were slaves and then free laborers. For years, the place has been a living-history museum, complete with slave quarters and school tours and Gone-with-the-Wind weddings.

The fields are still worked, mostly by Latinos (some illegal) employed by a giant agribusiness, and one of these laborers has been murdered in the sugarcane. There are family problems, racial realities, and political shenanigans (all with historical context) that Caren must deal with in trying to figure out the layers of this mystery in the present and another death (parallel in several ways) that emerges from the distant past.

The suspense is palpable -- sometimes even spooky -- as is the sense of geographical and historical atmosphere. The characters live and breathe, and I cared greatly about their outcomes. Despite a somewhat improbable ending to this puzzle, I think Locke is a very promising young author, and I look forward to more from her. The narrator is just perfect for this listen.

I found "The Cutting Season" to be an entertaining and often moving look into the main character's (and all of our) very complicated relationship with America's past and present and the changes which inevitably come.

Underwhelmed

The opening of the book was lush and held out much promise for an engrossing southern novel. However, the characters and the story didn’t live up to this beginning. I did enjoy the descriptions of a “living” plantation, Belle Vie, in this day and age. That part was fascinating. The main character, Caren, however, seemed unlikeable and I just didn’t care much about her. She makes some really stupid decisions. The relationship she has with her ex –husband just doesn’t ring true to me. In fact, all her relationships seem washed out or bland.

In the end, the solution to the mystery just seems to pop up out of nowhere. Or did I miss something?

Overall, I was underwhelmed.

Great listen!

If you like detective stories and mysteries, especially those that break the mold, I highly recommend this one. Its protagonist is an African American woman and the mystery to be solved connects the times of slavery in the United States with contemporary issues of undocumented migrants in farms. Very well done and a great performance read. I'm eagerly awaiting the next book by Attica Locke!

Very enjoyable - I'm a fan

Loved this author's writing style, it melded so nicely with the narrator's talents too. I felt transported to the plantation.It was very visual. The characters are likable and I was content that it did not end as nice and neatly as you might expect, for me it made it more credible. In the end I felt satisfied that the author answered most of the mystery. I will certainly add more of Attica Locke's books to my library.

Meh Story, Not so good Narrator, Bland, Whiny MC

I haven't finished it yet. I will finish it but only out of obligation at this point rather than enjoyment. So far the story is very "meh". Outside of the setting there is really nothing else about this story that I found intriguing or engaging. It's not a straightforward mystery from what I'm getting. The MC isn't actively trying to solve the case from where I'm at in the story. It's just something that is happening around her and she's kind of dipping in and out of it.

My biggest critiques of this story are the narrator and by extension the main character. The narrator is probably the first one that I've heard in my time with audible I didn't like. She does make minor mistakes but my problem is her voice. Not to disparage but her voice is high and nasally which makes the rest of the characters but especially the main character just seem like they're just whining.

Which gets me into the main character. Most mystery story enthusiasts know that part of a good mystery is giving us a likable sleuth who you want to solve the case. Personally I found the character of Caren too bland and mopey to find likable. I got no sense of her personality. Everything in the story is just happening to and around her and there isn't any real insight into her as a person. I have no idea what she likes or dislikes, if she even has a hobby. She's really kinda just there. And what I get from her backstory is just one sad story after another and how she's still carrying the sadness. So basically the only characteristic I did get is she's just sad and mopey.

wait for it......boom

liked it a lot, especially the performance. attica built tension from the beginning with the plantation, theme park murder scenario. i didn't mind how long it took to connect past and present. Some characters were too light

A great plot, mostly well-written and well-told.

As a white person who is devoted to anti racism work, the plot summary really grabbed me. Attica Locke does a very good job of giving unique personalities to each of the many characters. I though her descriptions of scenes and characters’ emotions were fresh and right on.

And I don’t know; maybe it was the time in which the book was written, but I kept waiting for the racism to come up. (Did the author play it safe?) The interactions between the black and white characters seemed weirdly devoid of comments and attitudes that surely were present and readily apparent in Louisiana in 2010, when the story takes place, in spite of whatever “racial progress” had been made to date.

Not only that, but the inherent mixed feelings Karen would have felt about a restored plantation recreating life as it was during slavery seemed to be glossed over. How could she work there and not have been deeply ambivalent, at best, working on the same plantation that her enslaved forebears suffered on? It left her character lacking the dimension it could have had.

There was also one scene that really felt forced near the end, where (no spoilers) Karen is panicked looking for someone she cares about and then takes a phone call and discusses a completely different topic.

Ms Locke, though, created a pretty complicated plot with many twists and turns, and brings it all together in the end, in a mostly believable fashion.

The narrator was good. II would have given her a 5 except for the fact that some of the characters’ voices sounded very similar and none of them had a real Louisiana accent. But these are relatively minor criticisms. I enjoyed listening to the book and would try this author again.

Save your credit

The summary of the book sounded good so I thought I would give this book a try. Honestly, I think the summary sounded more appealing than the story proved to be. There wasn't a whole lot of depth in the characters. I spent most of the time waiting for the climax and when that finally arrived...flat. That's the best word I can use to describe it. The mother/daughter bond didn't seem particularly strong. She tries to help one of her employees and although we know this person is important, I don't know if he was important to her, the historical property she takes care of or simply someone to save. Either way, I felt like I wasn't able to care about these people since the author doesn't give you enough to care about them.
And again, the climax was rather confusing. She has no phone, we assume she needs some help and when she was able to get to a phone, she starts talking about information! (I don't want to give away too much.) She doesn't say call 911, she doesn't say she is worried about her daughter and her ex-husband or boyfriend, I can't recall.

And unfortunately, the end of the book was frustrating! You think its going to go one way, you assume, hope it's going to go one way and yet again, this falls flat.

I'm aggravated with the author and the book. It was a true disappointment. I know everyone sees things differently and I'm sure there are others who will love the book. This is just my opinion which in the overall scheme of things, probably doesn't matter very much at all.