Molly Fredeen

This was not a good book - which was disappointing given the author's awesome non-fiction style. In its best moments, the plot points are stereotypical and usually revolve around flashy or aggravated murders of women without ever offering any character depth or purpose. At it's worst, the book tokenizes minority families and references some of the most horrific chapters of North American history (slavery, lynching, to name a few) to serve as brief allegories for how hard prohibition was on wealthy moonshiner empires. By not giving depth to ANY of the many significant events in this book, it does a serious disservice to them all. It'll give you reader's whiplash. You'll entirely forget about characters who die or leave because there are too many. You'll wonder if any of the themes ever close out (fastest girl in the world?) and learn that no, no themes ever close out. You'll say to yourself yourself "surely there can't be another climatic event to illustrate the point that marriage is bad" only to find more major events in each chapter. To give credit where it's due, the author is very good at describing action scenes. But overall, this wasn't a good read.