Placidia is seventeen when she meets Major Hockaday and when he proposes that very same day she says yes. That he is a widower and has a small son makes little difference to her. It’s 1865 and given the war there’s no point in waiting for a proper courtship and wedding. In fact, the very next day they set off for the Hockaday’s home. From there, Susan Rivers’s novel The ... Read More...
Miss Jane: A Novel
Jane Chisolm is a surprise baby, born to her parents long after her two older brothers have gone off to college and her sister is ten-years-old. But that’s not the only thing about Jane that’s unexpected. Her body didn’t fully develop in the womb and she is born with genital defects that rule out a normal woman’s life in rural Mississippi. It’s 1915, a time when no medical ... Read More...
Mudbound
In 1939, at age thirty-one Laura is considered almost unmarriageable. All of her siblings have married and left the family home in Memphis. She has resigned herself to the fate of spinster schoolteacher when Henry McAllen appears and wants to marry her. He seems like a kind man, even if he is ten years older than her and with a limp from his time in France during ... Read More...
Neverhome: A Novel
There comes a point in a reading life where, short of science fiction, it gets harder to be surprised by a novel’s premise but I have never before read a Civil War novel where the protagonist is a female… soldier. I’ve seen articles and photos of real-life women who fought disguised as men but had not come across it translated into fiction. How marvelous then that an author has ... Read More...
The Undertaker’s Daughter
Kate Mayfield takes readers into the world of her childhood in The Undertaker’s Daughter, a memoir that combines the unique circumstances of growing up in the 1960s in a small town in Kentucky while living above a funeral home. Through her we learn about a life and family held tight by the rituals of death. For Kate and her siblings, life was an odd combination of normalcy and ... Read More...
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
When Kevin’s little brother is killed in a freak accident he and his mother go to her father’s house for the summer to try and recover. Kevin is wracked with guilt about his part in the accident or, at least what his father tells him was his part. His mother is a wraith, the life sucked out of her, leaving her emotionally comatose. Her father lives in Medgar, Kentucky, deep in ... Read More...
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