Post-Civil War Era Fiction

Blood and Bridles

Amidst the Gilded Age in America, a boyish horse-lover and an aging whore get summoned to a decaying estate in the Adirondack Mountains as possible long-lost relatives and potential heirs. While their fragile little-old-lady hostess stages a lively contest for the inheritance, the two young women eventually work out that they’d better learn to trust each other if either is to leave with even her life.

Asa James

Asa James hasn’t exactly sucked on a silver spoon. No one chooses to grow up on a rural poor farm, but a mixed-race orphan with Asa’s scarred face has to make the best of what there is. Against the odds, he has grown into a young man determined to be a naturalist and a scientific thinker, in the vein of Charles Darwin. Without Darwin’s independent wealth, though, he has no means to travel the tropics and thus takes a tutor’s position at a mountaintop mansion. He bargained for the icy climbs on steep terrain to study moss and salamanders, but not for what else he finds at Mansfield Hall: the ghost of a murdered slave hunter, exotic stinging insects, and…Caroline Rockwell.

Young widow Caro Rockwell is glossy and grand, someone so far outside Asa’s experience that she seems another species. Then, when he begins to see the broken woman inside the shell, he starts to feel empathy and tries to keep it from turning into love—because it’s unthinkable she’d consider an ugly nobody from the poor farm. Except love doesn’t answer to logic and he’s in a terrible position, working for this intricate woman with no hope of anything good from it. So when, out of nowhere, she proposes a marriage of mutual benefit, it seems too good. He knows he should worry, but his heart won’t stop shouting Yes!—for at least he’ll get to be near her. But then, when a series of ugly secrets begin to emerge, including the way her people look at race, Asa sees how staying with Caroline comes at an untenable cost: that of his private respect for himself. In her world, he’ll always be lower…lesser. To part from her seems too hard—painful even to think about—but somehow he must find the will to rip himself away. And worse, he must tromp down any tiny seedling of hope, because Caroline—despite how she claims to love him—is too blinded by privilege to even see which mountain needs to move.

Civil War Era Fiction

Malvina Frye

Sometimes a cranky Yankee schoolteacher is the only one for the job.

For Malvina Frye, a flinty spinster from Vermont, unraveling a mysterious tragedy conflicts with a pressing call to duty—kicking the backsides of schoolboys-turned-soldiers to get them to Gettysburg.  It’s Olive Kitteridge at the Civil War, taking names.

Malvina Frye long ago gave up on ever seeing her brother again. When he disappeared as a baby, the heart-rending loss also cost her family their farm and their standing in town. At the age of 34, Malvina is stubborn and embattled, teaching school to earn money to buy land again. She’s determined to restore the Fryes as respected farmers. When it comes to light that her brother is alive and serving in the Union Army, there’s a chance to inherit a valuable piece of land if she can find him in time.

All the many aspects of her mission to get justice for her brother and her family come into conflict with doing her part for the war—the greater meaning of which has only begun to sink in. Malvina needs to get home before her family gets gutted again. These Vermont schoolboys need to drag their exhausted bodies to Gettysburg to hold the line in a pivotal battle. None of these boys will quit while the schoolteacher’s still marching.

The House of Blue and Gray

Once a debutante with a head full of stories, India West has spent the last eighteen years raising an illegitimate daughter in an elegant wreck of a plantation house. India is content to ignore the Civil War, but her daughter Sadie has grown into a fiery abolitionist—endangering them both in pro-slavery Kentucky. Sadie has also—somehow—landed a proposal from a young man of a prominent family. For India, so long an outcast, Sadie’s engagement could mean a return to society.

But Sadie is not her mother’s daughter. She trades society for the battlefield, disguising herself as a boy to join the Union army. India sets out to find her daughter in Vicksburg, a city under siege, where she takes cover among the Rebels. When Sadie is taken prisoner, India marshals her talent as a storyteller to become a spy for the North. In this dangerous new position she finds a chance to help the Union win the battle—by provoking a Rebel surrender. Except it would require she finally choose a side. It would reveal her as a traitor. It would as good as sign Sadie’s execution order.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

The Ella Kenyon book

A young woman captured and raised by the Seneca is now back in her original village and torn between the two worlds she knows, and uncertain how to juggle her loyalties and obligations. And there’s lots of hunting and knife throwing.

The Potomac book

An orphaned girl from Rhode Island finds a haven on a Virginia plantation. There she falls in love—with a girl living in bondage and working in the tallow house.