It’s not easy for a woman living alone with her young daughter in the mountains of Virginia during and immediately after the Civil War. It gets even harder when the wrong man catches them unawares.
I stumbled across this wonderful book by Jayne Anne Phillips when I was looking for a copy of The Nightwatchman. This is a very different book, but the description intrigued me, so I put in a request and read it as soon as it became available.
It’s very good, but also a very tough read. It deals with the Civil War and the Restoration, so some things included in this book that you might want to avoid include, rape, incest, slavery, war, violence, fire, murder, and abandonment, just to name a few.
It starts with Papa taking Mama and 12-year-old ConaLee to an insane asylum. Mama has been catatonic since Papa got back from the war, so he figures they can make a case for Mama needing their services and ConaLee joining her as her maid. They don’t have any money, so it’s not clear if this is a publicly funded institution, or if they’re expecting payment because Mama is dressed in nice clothes they got for free from a widower who no longer needed them.
The book goes back and forth in time so you come to understand that the Papa of the first chapter is not ConaLee’s father. Her father went to fight in the Civil War and never returned. They assume he’s either dead or abandoned them.
Then the book goes back even further to explain how ConaLee’s parents found each other in the first place and ended up escaping to live in the mountains of Virginia.
You also get to see what happened to ConaLee’s father after he went off to fight, how he got amnesia and had to build a whole new life for himself.
But he just happens to end up working at the same asylum where his wife and daughter end up. Of course, he doesn’t recognize them, but once Mama comes back to herself, she recognizes him, and they’re reunited.
I found a little hard to suspend my disbelief enough to the point of believing that, out of all the places in the country, they both just happened to find their way to the same institution.
I do think it’s interesting that they say ConaLee’s dad changed his name when he volunteered to fight for the Union, but they never say what he changed his name to.
ConaLee also changes her name when they get to the asylum, and her dad changes his name at one point, and we never find out what Papa’s real name is, so names in general aren’t permanent in this world. That’s fitting because very little is permanent in a world in which several states tried to leave the Union and a long and very bloody war was fought to prevent that from happening.
Although I wasn’t crazy about the ending, overall I think this is an excellent book, and I’m very glad I read it. If you can stomach the more graphic parts of the book, I highly recommend you give this one a read.