Book Thoughts: The Bridge of Deaths

The Bridge of Deaths is a labor of love created by and for people who are WWII buffs, history lovers, or are avid research fans.  For people in any of these categories, The Bridge of Deaths will be nirvana for you because all 3 areas are the focus of this hefty tome.

The "story" in this book centers around the actual events that occured in August 1939 on a small plane that crashed between Denmark and Germany shortly before the start of WWII.  What makes The Bridge of Deaths unique is its voice.  While the book is based on factual occurences, the author invented characters to energize and ennervate the story which is laden with footnotes, journal citations and books utilized to glean specific information about all aspects of the plane crash and the five people who perished.

While the crash was well-documented, the cause of the crash is shrouded in mystery.  No traditional research methods were providing the details of the ultimate reason the plane experienced a fire and crash landed in the salty cold waters of the ocean.  This is where Egan uses non-traditional methodology and her fictional characters to get to the root of the issue.

Egan has her fictional characters, Bill, Maggie and Catalina go to psychics, past life regressionists and hypnotherapists in order to ferret out details that the hard data did not divulge -- a fascinating concept!

The book was amazingly jam-packed with dates, facts, figures, old newspaper print, old photos and book citation references along with copious notes regarding each reference.  This is the perfect book for those who love putting large and complex jigsaw puzzles together as this is a word-puzzle in the form of a novelized documentary.

While this is not my traditional read, it was fascinating to see how Egan manipulated this hard-core material to create a work that is neither fully fiction or all fact but something in the nebulous area in-between.

Rating: 3 Blogairy Notebooks