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Summary
Summary
Reminiscent of Cold Mountain and Enemy Women, Robert Hicks' gripping debut novel, based on the incredible true story of Carrie McGavock--a woman whose life was forever changed by the Civil War--is exquisitely packaged with endpapers and compelling interior photographs.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hicks's big historical first novel, based on true events in his hometown, follows the saga of Carrie McGavock, a lonely Confederate wife who finds purpose transforming her Tennessee plantation into a hospital and cemetery during the Civil War. Carrie is mourning the death of several of her children, and, in the absence of her husband, has left the care of her house to her capable Creole slave Mariah. Before the 1864 battle of Franklin, Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest commandeers her house as a field hospital. In alternating points of view, the battle is recounted by different witnesses, including Union Lt. Nathan Stiles, who watches waves of rebels shot dead, and Confederate Sgt. Zachariah Cashwell, who loses a leg. By the end of the battle, 9,000 soldiers have perished, and thousands of Confederates are buried in a field near the McGavock plantation. Zachariah ends up in Carrie's care at the makeshift hospital, and their rather chaste love forms the emotional pulse of the novel, while Carrie fights to relocate the buried soldiers when her wealthy neighbor threatens to plow up the field after the war. Valiantly, Hicks returns to small, human stories in the midst of an epic catastrophe. Though occasionally overwrought, this impressively researched novel will fascinate aficionados. Agent, Jeff Kleinman. Major ad/promo, 15-city publicity tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Carrie McGavock witnessed the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee, on a day in 1864 when 9,000 soldiers were slaughtered, the vast majority of them Confederate. Carrie, the central character in this mesmerizing novel, was an actual historical figure. Her farm was close by the scene of the battle, and her house was commandeered as a makeshift hospital. And what Carrie the fictional character does after the battle, the actual Carrie did in real life. When more than 1,000 Confederate bodies buried in a neighboring field were threatened with desecration, she and her husband moved them to their own land and organized the only private Confederate cemetery. The brewing of the battle, its events, and the wound-healing time afterward are told by Hicks not only from Carrie's perspective but also from the points of view of Mariah, Carrie's slave-turned-friend; Carrie's plantation-owning husband; Union and Confederate soldiers and officers; and Carrie's neighbors. The author gracefully yet forcefully enters the psychology of these various individuals, each one representing a certain side in not only the battle at hand but also in the overarching context of nation rending. And, almost strangely yet certainly beautifully, from all this carnage emerges a love story that transcends time. See the adjacent Read-alikes column for other novels about the Civil War that use the multiple-perspectives device. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2005 Booklist
Guardian Review
The shelf of godawful to great novels of the American civil war is long indeed, and continues to grow. This season, at least three novels - one by a major contemporary writer, two by younger hands - have caught the attention of the reading public in the US and have now arrived on these shores. All three are accomplished works that blend fact and fiction, and each reminds us that the wounds of that unimaginably savage war have never quite healed - hence its fascination. The March by EL Doctorow, author of Ragtime and many other novels, follows the brutal progress of General William T Sherman's army of 60,000 Union soldiers through the South in 1864. After setting Atlanta ablaze, they marched to the sea, then north through the Carolinas. Everywhere they slaughtered troops and livestock, burned cities, villages and plantations, and lived off the land. Their blithe disregard for civilians established a pattern that dogs American forces to this day. The legendary general himself, portrayed here as a melancholy man with an idee fixe about preserving the Union, is somewhat peripheral to the novel; indeed, he first appears on page 74, as "an officer with gold shoulder straps" on a "big bay horse". The character who stumbles in front of this terrifying figure is Pearl, a mulatto slave-girl disguised as a Union drummer boy. A wily shape-shifter, she ultimately pairs off with an appealing soldier called Stephen Walsh, an Irishman from New York. The love story of Pearl and Stephen is perhaps the most fetching (if unrealistic) strand in this multilayered novel. One roots for them, even while suspending disbelief. (To be fair, Pearl is herself aware of future problems, wondering what colour their children's skin might be.) The novel makes no attempt to recreate the march of Sherman in any systematic fashion. Instead, history becomes the occasion for Doctorow to meditate on the nature of war, and how it corrupts everything it touches. As one eloquent southerner reflects: "The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant, foolish pretence was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed." Apart from Sherman, who seems thinly imagined in these pages, the story shifts among various clusters of (mostly) fictional characters as the march proceeds. Among these is Emily Thompson, daughter of Georgia supreme court justice Horace Thompson, who in the course of the novel attaches herself to the Union army, where she comes under the sway of an idealistic northern surgeon called Colonel Wrede Sartorius (the name strangely echoing that of a well-known character in Faulkner). When writing about the Thompson circle in the early chapters, Doctorow stumbles into the cliches of potboiler period fiction, even succumbing to the awkward tradition of writing in dialect, so that his black characters say things like: "If you know yo Bible, Miss Porhl, you 'member 'bout dat Jez'bel." But he recovers speedily, and the story rushes forward (or dashes sideways) with confidence and skill. One amusing storyline follows two southern misfits, Arly and Will, who shift adroitly from one side of the war to the other, coming to a bad end but not before providing huge dollops of comic relief. As the river of blue uniforms cascades through southern valleys of the shadows of death, any number of lives are swept into its torrent, and Doctorow does not spare us the gruesome details. Perhaps the march of Sherman's army is broadly metaphorical, representing the savage, mindless sweep of American power through the world. In any case, this ample, poetic novel ends on a broadly elegiac note, with Pearl and her soldier-boy riding off into the sunset: "There was still a scent of gunfire in the trees, and they were glad to come out into the sun again." Before writing A Widow of the South , his first novel, Robert Hicks became obsessed with the civil war and worked to preserve a historic plantation in Tennessee. It was the home of Carrie McGavock, who, with her slave Mariah, tended the wounds of thousands of dying Confederates after the Battle of Franklin, which claimed more than 9,000 lives on a single day in November 1864. (This battle, in which six Confederate generals died, is rightly considered a turning point in the war.) Carrie continued until her death in 1905 to tend the graves of the fallen. As we learn in an early chapter, General Nathaniel Bedford Forrest turned up one day and unexpectedly transformed her house into a field hospital. In deep seclusion while grieving for her three children, Carrie is led back into life by her confrontation with death, and by the rebirth of romantic love. Hicks has reconstructed this astonishing tale from letters and diaries, adding to the factual mix a number of fictional characters, including Zachariah Cashwell, a young soldier from Arkansas whom Carrie nurses back to life. Their cautious, moving and unlikely love story forms a counterpoint to this otherwise bleak tale of death and dying, rendered in harsh particularity by Hicks, who writes in sturdy prose that never overplays its hand. One might expect the romantic subplot to devolve into cliche, but it doesn't; Carrie and Zachariah are drawn to each other by a sense of shared grief, and this ennobles them both in believable ways. A Widow of the South is about the aftershocks of battle, and their lingering effects on those who must die or live with deep wounds, physical and psychic. Reading it, I became aware again of how the bad karma sown over a century and a half ago in the Old South continues to haunt Americans, who seem inevitably drawn into cycles of violence, which are always justified by those in charge as a defence of "freedom". The difficulty of extricating oneself from such cycles is the direct theme of Canaan's Tongue , a brilliant if somewhat dizzying novel by John Wray, who arrived on the scene with The Right Hand of Sleep in 2001, a moving novel set in the gloom of Austria in the late 30s. Much like Doctorow and Hicks, Wray is drawn to a "true" story, blending fiction with fact. Even Mark Twain was attracted to the story of the charismatic outlaw known as "the Redeemer", and wrote about him in Life on the Mississippi (1883). John Murrell (called Morelle by Wray) was one of the country's most illustrious gangsters - which is saying something. Wray narrates much of the book from the viewpoint of Virgil Ball, a one-eyed fellow from Kansas who finds himself irresistibly drawn to the Redeemer. Over several years, Ball reaps many benefits from his association with Morelle, whose dark business - called the Trade - is the traffic of stolen slaves. The novel opens dramatically on Island 37, a no-man's-land in the Mississippi River where Morelle and the last of his gang hide from numerous pursuers. The story flits (abruptly at times, spinning the reader's head) backward and forward, with sojourns in the Battle of Shiloh (1862) and fever-infected New Orleans. The civil war and slavery haunt this novel, although Wray's story is mainly about the enthrallment to violence, as fuelled by the insane marriage of religious fervor and high crimes. The novel speaks to our time, of course, as all good historical novels do, and offers an interesting perspective on the legacy of slavery in particular, as embodied by one character near the end, who tells Virgil Ball rather ominously that the future is made of "passings": "The passing of slavery, the passing of the Confederacy, the passing of the South. The passing of proclamations, of reconstructions, of humiliations run through centuries. The Trade, however, will not pass. A newer, more resilient strain will issue from the old." Jay Parini's novel of the American civil war, Anderson Depot , is published next year by HarperCollins. To order The March for pounds 10.99, The Widow of the South for pounds 9.99 or Canaan's Tongue for pounds 14.99, all with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-civilwar.1 The novel opens dramatically on Island 37, a no-man's-land in the Mississippi River where Morelle and the last of his gang hide from numerous pursuers. The story flits (abruptly at times, spinning the reader's head) backward and forward, with sojourns in the Battle of Shiloh (1862) and fever-infected New Orleans. The civil war and slavery haunt this novel, although Wray's story is mainly about the enthrallment to violence, as fuelled by the insane marriage of religious fervor and high crimes. The novel speaks to our time, of course, as all good historical novels do, and offers an interesting perspective on the legacy of slavery in particular, as embodied by one character near the end, who tells Virgil Ball rather ominously that the future is made of "passings": "The passing of slavery, the passing of the Confederacy, the passing of the South. The passing of proclamations, of reconstructions, of humiliations run through centuries. The Trade, however, will not pass. A newer, more resilient strain will issue from the old." The difficulty of extricating oneself from such cycles is the direct theme of Canaan's Tongue , a brilliant if somewhat dizzying novel by John Wray, who arrived on the scene with The Right Hand of Sleep in 2001, a moving novel set in the gloom of Austria in the late 30s. Much like [EL Doctorow] and [Robert Hicks], Wray is drawn to a "true" story, blending fiction with fact. Even Mark Twain was attracted to the story of the charismatic outlaw known as "the Redeemer", and wrote about him in Life on the Mississippi (1883). John Murrell (called Morelle by Wray) was one of the country's most illustrious gangsters - which is saying something. Wray narrates much of the book from the viewpoint of Virgil Ball, a one-eyed fellow from Kansas who finds himself irresistibly drawn to the Redeemer. Over several years, Ball reaps many benefits from his association with Morelle, whose dark business - called the Trade - is the traffic of stolen slaves. - Jay Parini.
Kirkus Review
A thunderous, action-rich first novel of the Civil War, based on historical fact. Music publisher Hicks treats a long-overlooked episode of the war in this account of the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., which took place in November 1864 near Nashville. As a field hospital is pitched in her field, Carrie McGavock, an iron-spined farm woman and upstanding citizen of the town, takes it upon herself to tend after the Confederate wounded; later, she and her husband will rebury 1,500 of the fallen on their property. Hicks centers much of the story on Carrie, who has seen her own children die of illness and who has endurance in her blood. "I was not a morbid woman," Carrie allows, "but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head. Say what you have to say to me, or leave me alone." Other figures speak their turn. One is a young Union officer amazed at the brutal and sometimes weird tableaux that unfold before him; as the bullets fly, he pauses before a 12-year-old rebel boy suffocating under the weight of his piled-up dead comrades. "Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility," young Lt. Stiles sighs. Another is an Arkansas soldier taken prisoner by the Yankees: "I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I'd picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks." Yet another is Nathan Forrest, who would strike fear in many a heart as a Confederate cavalryman, and later as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Hicks renders each of these figures with much attention to historical detail and a refreshing lack of genre clichÉ, closing with a subtle lament for the destruction of history before the bulldozer: "One longs to know that some things don't change, that some of us will not be forgotten, that our perambulations upon the earth are not without point or destination." An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
John McGavock, the husband of our eponymous heroine, isn't even dead when she begins wearing black, but the mantle of mourning seems to fit Carrie McGavock. Having lost three young children, it is perhaps appropriate that she becomes the caretaker of over 1500 Confederate dead, all killed at the Battle of Franklin, TN, in 1864. Based on a true story, music publisher Hicks's first novel brings the reader onto the battlefield and into the lives of its survivors, including Zachariah Cashwell, an Arkansas soldier whose presence at the makeshift hospital established in the McGavock home shakes Carrie out of her stupor: "I had discovered why I had been drawn to him," she says. "He is a living thing, not a dying one." And it is life, after all, that drives Hicks's story. We know from the outset about Carrie's cemetery, but her journey to that place is compellingly told. Highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/05.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.