The Cold Millions

Got this from my mom - the verdict from her and one of her book clubs was a hearty thumbs up, and I agree! I will say that she and I are both predisposed to have liked it. The context of the novel is union activism in Spokane in the early 20th century: she's a labor lawyer, and I just relocated from there. Walter is very adept at blending facts about that history and geography with his fiction, and the details (some of which I knew, some of which I didn't) really resonated with my love-hate relationship with the locale (e.g., small details like the names of bars that have been reincarnated in recent years, a building I used to work in makes a cameo appearance, and how strange it is that the courthouse is across the river from other important municipal buildings, big chunks of history like George Wright's evil genocide of Spokane and local Indigenous people and their horses [a road named after him only got renamed in 2020 to honor Whist-alks, a Spokane woman who contributed to the resistance to his violent oppression], and things in between, like how a part of the country that created Taft, the wickedest city in all of America for a few short years before burning up in a literal ball of flames, shaped the region's culture [truly, the history of Taft is a wild ride I recommend]). Anyway! Enough about my feelings about the inland northwest. Walter is quoted in an interview as intentionally using the economic and social strife of this time as a commentary on our own, and to his credit, those echoes are loud and clear without feeling didactic. The threads from multiple narrators were skillfully interwoven, I appreciated that the characters were just people without either pure saints or sinners, and this is the sort of book that I read always feeling driven to know how the story ended.