“BLACK CLOUD RISING” by David Wright Faladé (Atlantic Monthly Press, 290 pages, $27).
There’s nothing pulpy about David Wright Faladé’s “Black Cloud Rising.” It’s a Civil War novel based on the actual experiences of the African Brigade, a unit of Black soldiers, including many newly released slaves, that in 1863 poured into the coastal South with Union forces, helping to hunt down rebel guerrillas.
Faladé’s book is so accessible and rousing, though, that you hope it becomes available as a mass-market paperback, in packaging that more clearly announces the following: This book is a straight-up page-turner.
There are no braided points of view here, no too-pretty words, no splintered syntax. No leaden diagnoses of the human predicament belch on the smoky skyline. The nature of the American experiment is implicitly questioned but not burned to the ground.
What is burned to the ground, satisfyingly, are the houses of holdout slave owners, landed aristocrats. This is a classic war story told simply and well, its meanings not forced but allowed to bubble up on their own.