The Old Bridge and The Roller Dam

This short memoir, giving an interesting segment of a family living in a small eastern Iowa town of some three-thousand, could be a nice read. The book starts with an eight-year old boy growing up in a large extended German Catholic family in the middle of farming communities during the Great Depression. The main character’s life is followed through junior high and high school (in first-person, singular).

However, The Old Bridge and The Roller Dam needs serious editing. Roling’s writing is good, very readable, but the text has numerous errors a good editor would correct. Some are minor errors, but annoying, like duplicate pagination, and page numbers placed on wrong places. Or switching from past to present tense within the same paragraph. The story is good, but doesn’t flow well; again, an editor should be able to suggest constructive changes. The entire book is one continuous text, with only paragraph breaks that make it hard on the reader. Chapter breaks and photo illustrations to visualize the characters would help to improve this volume. Adding dialogues would also aide the content tremendously.

With some changes and significant expansion of the story, this could be a historically interesting memoir.