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Title: Hammon Falls

Author: Dave Hoing, Roger Hileman

Narrator: Laura Jennings

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-07-13

Publisher: All Things That Matter Press, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

When George Hammon's teenaged wife dies in childbirth in 1914, he flees small-town Iowa for Europe and the horrors of the Great War. Surviving battles, homelessness, and disease, he squanders his days on women and wine, trying to forget his lost love. But life is not idle in Iowa during his absence, and when a bitter and weary George comes home twenty-two years later, he finds a web of murder, suicide, and shocking revelations.

The future of his family rests on one terrible choice...but is he prepared to make it? Spanning the years 1893 through 2009, Hammon Falls weaves a tapestry of estrangement, loss, love, sacrifice, and redemption.

Members Reviews:

A Tight Weaving of Historical Fiction

Hammon Falls begins with ninety-four year-old Will in present day, relaxing in a jacuzzi, telling a telephone to shut up its ringing. When he finally answers, he finds it's his daughter. She tells him that she has unearthed a family relic. And so the story begins.

From the opening on, Hammon Falls is told through a third person narrator as it spans time from 1893 to 2008, only the story is not told in a series of chronological vignettes but a calculated manner that exposes a town and a family's history as it weaves generations creating a dynamic look at how our family patterns influence todays outcomes. The story is largely researched and based on a real life Iowa town, and this much is evident in the manner it is told--often times, the novel reads as a biography or historical essay--but it also incorporates the techniques of a master storyteller (two storytellers) as many of the scenes come to life in a manner that makes them emotive and easy to visualize.

There is something really beautiful about combining true-to-life stories with an openly-imaginative storyteller in order to pull out the delicate patterns of family and locale history. Hammon Falls is a great piece of work that has endeared me, for the time being, to an entire genre that I don't often read: historical fiction. My only gripe would be the images, which to a big biography and memoir fan, seemed distracting to a book that has openly told readers that the characters within are fictionalized--I say give the reader the license to imagine the images through the writing and descriptions. This is a small thing, though, and the images ability to distract this reader is most likely highly subjective. The writing and brilliance of the telling more than make up for my slight distraction. Hammon Falls is a wonderful book, and I would recommend it to just about anyone.

Dynamic Duo

As far as I'm concerned, there can be no acceptable explanation as to why the dynamic Dave Hoing/Roger Hileman duo has not yet attained bestseller status. "Hammon Falls" has it all: vivid description, a riveting plot, complex characters and relationships, literary depth, and more.

Spanning the years 1893 through 2009, "Hammon Falls" takes its readers on a journey through multiple settings, points of view, and time periods, with every scene, every emotion, and every action described in beautiful prose that sparkles but is never overwrought. Hoing and Hileman are musicians as well as authors, a fact that can be seen in the following passage, where their language both appreciates music and creates it:

Slowly the music changed from a bright major key to a slow minor one.