GREEN GROW THE VICTIMS

Despite the handicaps of being a female servant, and an immigrant, Swedish-born Hilda Johansson struggles to solve a murder and kidnapping in early twentieth-century South Bend, Indiana. Although the plot is a bit flat, narrator Kate Reading brings richness with her renditions of the mixed brew of dialects found in turn-of-the-century America. Kate Reading is especially skillful in her interpretations of stress, lapsing from carefully controlled English to an English heavily inflected with the accents of home. While author Jeanne M. Dams focuses on the political climate, including discrimination faced by immigrants from less recent arrivals, it is Reading who enlivens the book with her characterizations. P.H.M. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB / MAR 03]