Member Reviews of forthcoming books.

Rated of 5

The author has done a magnificent job of creating a beautiful story of love made especially meaningful because it has survived prejudice, feelings of betrayal, sorrow, the beastly ugliness/savagery of war, forgiveness, and individual searches for self. Notice that I did not call it a "love story" because those words describe a romance. This book conveys deeper feelings and thoughts and the love found in the book expands to more than just one mere man and a woman.

We all are certainly aware of other Civil War novels – that history has been widely cussed and discussed as a period of national disaster and for certain people, feelings about that history continues to separate our nation. This is a Civil War novel but it is written about another group of people who also suffered terrible abuse in my country – a country that I deeply love with great pride because it does in fact offer liberty and justice for all. Remarkably, many of us have lived a full life mostly unaware of the magnitude of this other shameful period in our history. The author successfully gives us a history lesson about this abuse without making us feel she is chiding us.

The man in the novel is a wounded confederate soldier and the woman (the product of a marriage between an immigrant from China and a Native American woman) is the nurse who cares for him. The novel traces the lives of three people: the soldier, the nurse, and the nurse's father. The Chapters in the book switch back and forth allowing each of the three main characters to narrate their individual stories. In this way, we can successfully become the alter ego of each of them – sharing their feelings, thoughts, pain, and love. While this might sound like it might be confusing, the flow to me was quite natural.

I recommend it to audiences of all ages – with a warning in advance however that the descriptions not only tell about the need for forgiveness felt by the people who survive but they also provide graphic accounts of the horror of the battle fields.

Rated of 5

The book is a page turner that I will recommend to my friends - even the ones who love non-fiction best.

Rated of 5

The book is beautifully written in rich and lush language. The author describes the battles and horrific army camps full of grotesquely wounded and dying soldiers with unrelenting realism while portraying its characters' emotions with great sensitivity and compassion. The author has carefully researched the book which is particularly interesting because the events are presented from the perspective of minorities who participated in the Civil War, in this case Johnny and Era Tom. The overarching theme of the book is the juxtaposition of honesty and deceit especially as it relates to Era and Warren. Their love is intense; however, Warren's devotion to the Confederate cause and Era's role as a Union spy leads inevitably to a crisis that threatens their relationship as well as their ethics. How they deal with the situation provides the reader with an absorbing literary experience.

Rated of 5

I would highly recommend because it tells a story of the realities of war and the very human characters.