Spoiler-free summary: Chris is a fourteen-year old living in the hills of Tennessee during the Civil War. The Union Army has control of the area, and he hates them with a passion, especially after they take his family’s food and horse. He deals with a mix of people, some who support the Union cause, some who prefer the Confederacy like him, but others are against the war entirely. His views develop with his experiences. A relatively short book with a lot of regional and historical color and an in-your-face moral of an ending.
Discussion: This one snuck up on me a bit. As I said in the summary, it is not subtle with its moral – Chris is over the top with his hatred of the Union and his desire to have them defeated by the Confederate army, to the point of him being a one-note character for the first 2/3 of this book. It was inevitable that he was going to soften a bit at the end, especially given the role of people in his life who opposed the war, like his parents. I expected something like his experience with the Union wagon train, where soldiers were nice to him, but I did not expect the brutality of the fighting the next morning.
I also was surprised by the development of the character of Silas. Again, the clash in views of what type of person Silas was between Chris and his parents was bound to lead to Chris having some revelation about him, but I was thinking his heel turn would be something like him actually being a spy for the Union. The fact that he really was just a big-talking nobody like Chris’s parents said was almost funny.
These shorter novels are tough to gauge. There’s only so much that they can accomplish in their length, so “not much happened” isn’t really a valid criticism. In some cases, you wish there was more, but in this case, maybe I wanted less. I’m not sure all of the first 120 pages – everything before he approaches the Union camps – was necessary to set up who Chris is. This might actually be a short story padded out to a novella. Cut out Chris and Silas’s attempted ambush and the chase, cut out releasing the mules, focus on the army taking his family’s stuff and his brother leaving for the army.
This is also a novel where I wonder if the attempt to sound from a certain time and place goes too hard. One too many “I was scarder than a junebug in a crawdad holler” makes things cross from setting an interesting scene to condescending. Tastes may vary there, though.
My next book is Aranka Siegal’s Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944. Looking forward to another downer about war!
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