The Widow of the South, by Robert Hicks.
In an attempt to actually finish a book for the Historical Fiction challenge, I picked this one up. I had had enough of Tudor England and Europe in general so I thought I might try and find some his. fic. centering on life closer to home.
This book is about Carrie McGavock and
The Second Battle of Franklin, TN in 1864. We used to live near there, about an hour south, so I thought it might be cool to read about it. Even though, in the two summers I spent in Tennessee, I never made it over there, and in fact, never knew this battle even existed. I blame my government school education.
In summary, the Confederates suffer devestating losses at Franklin, including 6 Generals (that Carrie lays out on her front porch) and the McGavock plantation is used as a makeshift hospital for the injured. Carrie nurses some back to health, and in a fictional twist, has a very bizarre relationship with one of them, Zacariah Cashwell. Later, two years after the war, Carrie and her husband oversea the moving of the dead from their group burial ground to a part of their own land, which is where the
cemetary still exists today.
Reading this book, I imagine is how many Europeans feel reading books like
The Other Boleyn Girl which are just filled with errors. Hicks claims 9,000+ people died that day in Franklin, but everything I've read said it was a 2-3,000. Hicks says Carrie cared for thousands, wikipedia says 300. Obviously dramatic license was taking to make things seem more dire, or more disasterous. But 300 men, fighting in the tail end of a war that was about to end is a story of itself, and I don't think it needed dressing up.
He also tries to make a villian for his narrative, out of a character named Mr. Baylor. Some fictional drama ensues and a supposedly climatic confrontation result in him "allowing" Carrie to remove the dead from their original graves to the McGavock's land. According to what I've read, a couple of years after the battle the original grave markers (wooden) were detereorating and it was becoming difficult to identify the dead. So the McGavock's donated their land, and the city raised funds to arrange for the plots to be moved.
What I don't understand, is why Hicks villianize the town of Franklin. In his novel, they city is full of horrible people who would as soon shoot each other as soon as lend a hand, and if the truth is that they all raised the money to honor the fallen boys of the South ... well isn't that worth telling? Isn't that better than reducing Franklin to a town of villeanous, angry, racists? No doubt they were racist - but I'm sure that's not all they were. Especially not when it concerned the young men that had died within their city limits.
I finished the book through, but it was long and drug on and I didn't care for any of the characters. Carrie made absolutely no sense and was crazy and inconsistent. She lost three children to fever and became a recluse and strange. While I can only imagine that such a thing is a fate worse than death, in the late 1800s it was common, and the infant mortality rate was very high. It just wasn't believable to me.
And ... spoiler coming ... somewhere near the middle of the book as Cashwell and Carrie are forming their very odd and unbelievable (literally - I didn't beleive it at all) friendship, they are yelling at each other about something and then Cashwell says inadvertently that he loves her. She then decides that she will hit him repeatedly with a shovel and almost kills him. She sits outside with his beaten corpse for several days, and when he finally comes to, it's like it never happened.
I couldn't get passed it. I know that Hicks intended for this to be some sort of emotional, dramatic cresendo that releases Carrie from her doom and gloom morbidity and awaken to the prospect of life and love, but it just felt odd to me, and wrong. And strange.
It was worth a read for the history of it all, but it was far too long and the author is too in love with the sound of his own voice. That was the other thing ... we start off with several different POVs, Carrie's, Cashwells, and unsundry Confederates and Yankees as we go through the battle and it's diversities. This was good. I liked hearing all the different sides. But then the author gets lazy, especially in the third part of the novel. We have Carrie, Cashwell, and the Carnton and then Franklin. In the Carnton and Franklin chapters he switches back and forth between either John McGavock, Mariah their former slave, Theopolis, her son, Eli (fictional back story), Becky (ditto), and I think that's it. But it just felt lazy.
I think I'm going to have to develop a scale for rating these books. But I have to think on it. I don't want to do numbers or stars ... I have to think on it. If you've read this book let me know what you thought. Maybe I'm just ... silly.
