Tag: post civil war

Chenneville by Paulette Giles (Historical Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 Characters: 4/5 Plot: 3.5/5

A beautifully written book that fits into the same post Civil War world as her News of the World and Simon the Fiddler. Jean-Louis Chenneville — once a successful farmer and gentleman — returns from the war a broken man having spent a year in the hospital in a semi-coma. He awakens to a dark world of ruin — Lincoln had been assassinated, Lee had surrendered, and the Gray Union army had gone home. His body and mind are slowly healing — his memory has wide gaps.

When he does finally get home, he gets worse news — news that sends him off on a long, single-minded journey to right a terrible wrong. Giles excels at bringing a place and time to life — in this case I almost wish she was a little less skilled. It is a depressing time — full of chaos, corruption, and despair. The war is over but things have not returned to any kind of normal — there is little stability in the South, with deep-seated hatreds and little consistent law enforcement.

The story is slow paced with characters — some unpleasant but many good people just trying to make things work again — introduced as part of his heroic journey. Each character had a unique backstory that highlighted all the different people who found themselves in this difficult time and place from a wide variety of starting points. My favorite part had to do with the telegraph operators that he met and the sub community they formed (with details completely and accurately belonging to the time period). There were definitely times that I wished we could have a little less atmosphere and more plot. The book was thick with description and I don’t visualize from textual description very well, which made some of the (albeit exquisitely depicted) passages tedious for me. I was happy with the ending, but until then it was a bit of a depressing read — depressing because of how hard that time really was, not because someone put a bunch of dramatic events to force readers into heavy emotions. I’m very glad I read it, but I wasn’t super cheerful during that week …

Some quotes:
“The clippers ran like teeth over the long scar. John shut his hands together with tense precision as if pain were a mathematical problem, as if he had just solved it and the solution did not include making a noise if he could help it. Sweat ran down his face.”

“The Ohio steamboat was better because the only movement was the unhinged, sliding feel of a vessel with a shallow keel as it moved across the water.”

“He tried to get a grip on himself. This was no way to live, in this messy chaos of despair.”

“People were draining south like wintertime migratory birds.”

“Every word seemed some strange phrase of dejection and unhappiness.”

Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book was published on September 12th, 2023

The News of the World by Paulette Jiles

Writing: 4 Characters: 4 Plot: 3.5

A Wild West story that by no means glorifies the period. Captain Jefferson Kidd — seventy two years old and making his living by reading the “news of the world” to audiences around Texas for a dime a piece — takes on a troubling task: to return a ten-year old white girl to relatives after being kidnapped by the Kiowa four years before. She is not a willing passenger: she has no memory of her original parents and has been thoroughly “Indianized”. She speaks only Kiowa and can’t bear crowds, western clothing, or being indoors.

The time is 1870 — shortly after the end of the Civil War. Texas appears almost lawless with tensions running high between those supporting different candidates and all the men with any law enforcement experience sent away. Kidd reads the news in order to bring the exotic into people’s lives — he avoids controversial topics and prefers to “escort” his audience’s mind “into the lands of the imagination — far places, crisp ice mountains, falling chimney pots, tropical volcanoes.” The news items he reads, and many of the characters he runs into, are historic: Britt Johnson, the Horrell brothers, the Cinncinnati red stockings (the first professional baseball team), Ada Kepley (the first female law graduate), a new bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn …

It’s a long distance from where he picks up the girl to where she is to be delivered. On the way are multiple opportunities to describe landscape, daily details (broom making machine, meat grinders, US soldiers guarding any assembly), thieves and outlaws, and people trying to muster the courage to be good in a world gone haywire. While the girl grows to trust the Captain, the Captain becomes less happy about what she will face upon delivery. Everything we know about the girl we know from Captain Kidd’s perspective. He is the only person in the story who appears to be able to empathize with her and he does it beautifully. With his age and experience, he is better able to express her experience than she is herself.

A short, fast, read that feels more like catchy journalism than a typical novel (the detail gives it a sense of veracity not often found in historical fiction). Good writing! A few sample lines:

“Captain Kidd could not make himself back down, it was not a thing for which he had any aptitude, nor had he ever, and it was far too late in life to change.”

“Captain Kidd looked up and enviously considered the chickens — so daft, so stupid, so uninformed.”

”He could almost hear the jointed sound as one vertebrae settled on another.”