4 stars
Disclaimer: The Daily Tar Heel received a complimentary copy in exchange for our unbiased review.
“Work Like Any Other” is a beautifully woven tale of Roscoe T Martin, a man who is passionately in love with electricity and less passionately in love with his wife. He moves to his wife’s family farm after her father’s death and has no taste for farmwork, but he finds himself illegally hooking his farm up to the electric lines to keep himself busy. When an electric company employee is electrocuted and killed by Roscoe’s illegal power lines, he’s sent to jail and so is Wilson, the Martins’ helping hand who has kept the farm going over the years.
The good
Roscoe will break your heart. Marie will make you furious. Wilson will bring tears to your eyes.
“Work Like Any Other” makes you feel so many things. Not all of those things are good. You feel Roscoe’s guilt when he learns that Wilson, a black man, has been shipped off to work in a coal mine for the duration of his sentence — all because Roscoe enticed Wilson to help him hook up the lines. You feel Marie’s disgust with her husband for what he did to Wilson and his family. You feel every single moment of this book.
This is not a fun book, and it will not make you smile. But it is a good book and a thoughtful book, and all around, it is worth reading. It is so worth reading.
The bad
It’s too short. Something I rarely, if ever, say. I wanted more from “Work Like Any Other” and that is genuinely my main problem with it. I needed to know what happened to Roscoe and his relationship with his son. I needed to know if he found love and found a life. I didn’t need a happy ending, per se, but I wanted more.
Why I gave it four stars
Besides the length, I felt that I didn’t get to understand Marie and why she abandoned Roscoe until far too late. I won’t spoil that reveal, but I was already deep, deep in hatred for Marie before I realized that she had a lot of reason to sink into herself the way that she did. I continued to hate her after, but I wish that I had understood more of her character when I made that original judgment.
Suggestions
This book isn’t similar to “The Last Lawyer” or “I Am Troy Davis” but those are two great reads about the criminal justice system that you should definitely follow up with. And if you’re taking Political Science 203, you should read this book after you finish your class readings.
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