Crossing Stones - Helen Frost

Frost, Helen. Crossing Stones. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

I got the feeling that the message Frost was wanting to get portray with Crossing Stones was a lot more about the sufferings of those in the Women’s Suffrage movement than that of the men at war. As I finished the book my experience from taking multiple women’s studies classes at Appalachian was in the forefront of my mind. It would be easy for me to slip back into the mindset of focusing on how women having been oppressed and silenced throughout history and start praising Muriel as the real star in the book for stepping up and breaking the mold. However, I think that the entire book comes together and does a good job showing all sides of the horrors of war and oppression. Each character responded to events based on their own personal views and made deliberate decisions that reflected those views. I don’t think that any of them were downplayed or ridiculed in the text due to those choices either, which reflects a very open and accepting mindset by the author. She clearly liked Muriel the best, and possibly influences some readers to do the same, but I don’t think she demands the reader to agree with her views at any point.

Regardless of the political and social implications within this book, I think that it is an amazing work of poetic art. The hidden rhyme schemes of the poetry were like a buried gem in an already powerful story. It was amazing how natural the story was able to flow as if it were prose merely restricted by the shapes formed by the variations in the margins for each line depending on the voice speaking. The effort that must have gone into balancing the rhyming words without affecting the readability of the final piece, must have been enormous. It almost seems like a shame that it wasn’t mentioned at the beginning so that the reader could admire this lyrical feat throughout the book. Sure, it would have likely gotten in the way of the initial message and story that I took from the book, but I feel like I was made to stare at an elegant painting to attempt to decipher the author’s intent in their work only to be later told that I’d been staring at it upside down the whole time…