These two titles are books that I reviewed for The Children’s Crown Award Reading Challenge and which are only marginally mysteries. However, they both deal with the South and are great contrasts with one another and with Whispers of the Bayou - my last entry.
1st Tease:
Red Moon At Sharpsburg
by Rosemary Wells
Adapted from the front flap:
When the Civil War breaks out in 1861, 12 year old India Moody’s relatively comfortable life changes forever. As she struggles for survival, she gets an education in love and loss, the senseless devastation of war, and the triumph of hope in the face of despair. Though the daughter of a harness maker, she has always enjoyed the friendship of the wealthy Trimble family, owners of Longmarsh Hall Plantation. Independent and headstrong, India prefers learning botany and chemistry over the genteel subjects usually assigned young ladies.
From page 65:
‘Pa is going to be safe in his new corps, we hope and we pray,’ I will tell her first. How can Julia understand this? Her father comes home from his law office every evening. He removes his beautifully polished shoes and sits down with a glass of sherry brought by a servant who is better fed and paid than any man who marched up our street today.Four sentences instead of two, but a good tease for this excellent novel for young adults.
Wells’ style is right on pitch, capturing the soft Southern voice. Her research is meticulous, enabling her to capture the horror of the battle of Sharpsburg at Antietam Creek. The contrast of the civilians picnicking on the hills overlooking the battlefield with the nightmare they watch through their field glasses had me in tears.
Red Moon at Sharpsburg is intense with realistic descriptions of a horrible reality, yet it is also lyrical in its depiction of a young girl’s too rapid passage from childhood to adulthood as she finds a way to achieve her life’s ambition and her heart’s desire.
Four Delights with johnnycakes and sorghum syrup!!!!
2nd Tease:
Tennyson
by Lesley m. M. Blume
The CIP record summary:
After their mother abandons them during the great Depression, eleven-year-old Tennyson Fontaine and her little sister Hattie are sent to live with their eccentric Aunt Henrietta in a decaying plantation house outside of New Orleans.Tennyson is for all intents and purposes a good Southern Gothic. The first chapter is mesmerizing, pulling the reader into the sultry, verdant landscape of south Mississippi and into the decaying luxury of the Louisiana plantation Aigredoux where the present is inextricably bound to the past.
From p. 45:
The spiders in the trees began to weave great webs in the branches They worked faster and faster and soon the air between every branch and trunk turned into spider silk, as though a vast fine cloth the color of air had been draped over the entire oak alley.Overall I enjoyed Tennyson - the first half more than the last half. It gives a glimpse into the Depression era South which is not so far removed from the Civil War. My biggest criticism is that Blume does not sustain a stable level of style but alternates between clichés and brilliant prose.
3½ Delights with pralines!!!
