Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published in USA
Mar 2007
480 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
This is the story of America over twenty years of its most turbulent history. The characters are black, white, red, ex-Union, and ex-Confederate, and the principal narrator is a Santee woman, She Goes Before, who marries an ex-slave. Through her eyes we witness the hanging of her father by whites in the mass execution of 1863, Red Cloud's banquet with President Grant, and that final confrontation on the bluffs above the Little Bighorn.
"McCaig's latest is authoritative and occasionally profound." - PW.
"Black life in Reconstruction-era Virginia is portrayed particularly well; Jesse Burns, who rises from slavery to become a state assemblyman, embodies the modest but real gains made by blacks in that brief, hopeful time." - Library Journal.
"A husk of a novel; busy, but without cumulative power." - Kirkus.
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