In preparation for a cross-continental flight to see my then fiancé and now wife, I requested some reading material. In a grand gesture that is proof you should always select your own books, my best friend brought back The Widow of the South from Wal-Mart. At first I thought this was a joke, but honestly I was pretty angry. I can definitely handle documentaries on The History Channel or even PBS from time to time, but a novel about the American Civil War? I was livid. Airplane flights are boring enough now that they don’t offer you free peanuts and I could barely conceive of how this book was supposed to help me assuage the gnawing emotions of traveling to my fiancé. I mean, really, the Civil War!

Begrudgingly, I began reading it that night just to prove how much I knew it would reek of overly complex language, boring settings, dull actions and characters I couldn’t relate to set in a time period I had no interest in whatsoever. This era is, after all, the very topic that every American school kid is forced to endure in grade school history class. Tedious, disagreeable and absolutely uninteresting. Studying this time period had been, for me, like watching a tedious horror film that is only about recounting unseen events and tallying body counts. Having been forced to endure tours of Civil War monuments and battlefields as a kid, my dislike of the whole subject was fierce.

So, after a few pages I realized I wasn’t hating Robert Hicks’ writing as much as I felt I should. In fact, his tale of real world Civil War survivor Carrie McGavock was not as sluggishly paced as I’d imagined since Hicks had the vision to give us the viewpoints of several other characters as the chapters progressed. This switching back and forth worked nicely because in all honesty, this could have easily been a tedious book due to the setting and length of time it covered. We get to see not only Mrs. McGavock, the daughter of a Old South plantation owner, but her personal servant and trusted best friend Mariah – who is essentially a slave due to her ethnicity. The two women have an odd, but somehow believable relationship that transcends the sick society they had the misfortune to be raised in. It’s almost disturbing how Hicks manages to make this particular friendship look beautiful while not condoning the obvious problem of slavery that was a definite part of life at those times in that region.

Beyond these two women there is Zacariah Cashwell, a Confederate soldier who finds himself missing a leg after a valiant charge into the hopeless onslaught of gunfire being laid down by Union troops. There are many minor characters sewn into the narrative and all of them give much more depth than Hicks technically needed to give, lending the novel a real feeling of emotional authenticity. While Carrie McGavock and some of the other characters are actual deceased people who really did run the makeshift Confederate hospital known as Carnton in Franklin, Tennessee – the book’s primary setting – many of the characters are purely creations of the author’s imagination based on his research.

Yes, there are plenty of facts and figures in the book, even a map to show you the battlefield that the majority of the book is referencing. However, the way that Hicks has presented his story is irresistible even though I do not savor historical fiction. That, to my mind, is the strongest edge this book has over any other piece of historical fiction I’ve ever read – and I read quite a lot as a child.

What separates The Widow of the South from other books I’ve read that are set in this era is its unflinching look into the ugliness not only of the battles and the society at the time, but the ugly side of even the best people that we would otherwise worship. Hicks writes with a level of penetration into his subject matter that I find more typical in nihilistic horror novels or transgressive fiction. You will feel those cannon balls slam into the earth, tearing adolescent boys apart. You will experience the agonizing pain of watching men and boys who have lost limbs or been torn open sob for their mothers or at least a chance to avoid death. It is disturbing to comprehend that this story not only took place, but was most likely far more terrifying and awful than even Hicks could convey.

The black fog of grief, the tenderness of the most minuscule and seemingly insignificant kindness, the daring thrill of forbidden love, the creeping fear that even when a war is over its ghost lingers long on the land it appears to have faded from – these are all hugely powerful experiences that The Widow of the South provides. In my view, it changes what we readers should expect from fiction of this nature. There are few books that are as joltingly compelling or painfully sweet as this one.

If you think that you can handle just 20 pages of this book, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you finished it in only a few sittings. It’s genuinely a remarkable book from a passionate, highly skilled writer who put heart and soul into this story we might otherwise prefer to forget.

Visit Robert Hicks’s website to learn more about his books: http://www.widowofthesouth.com/

Click here to get your hands on “The Widow of the South”

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