Book Description
Emma Garnet, the heroine of Kaye Gibbons's sixth novel,
takes the reader on a Southern journey through place and
time, from 1842 to 1900. We see her first as a plantation
owner's daughter, pampered by servants yet self-taught in
subjects not then in the woman's sphere. As a girl, she does
not question the South's peculiar institution, but gradually
she recognizes the brutality of slavery. Still, during the
Civil War, she works tirelessly in a Southern military
hospital, ministering to the wounded out of her fervent sense
of loyalty to the South. Throughout the conflict Emma Garnet
contains her own warring impulses: her love of the Old South
and her hatred of the way it reduces people to chattel. After
the war, Emma Garnet attempts to reconcile herself to its
trail of death and devastation by moving North, where, she
believes, her answers lie. Her search takes twenty years, and
only near the end of her life does she find peace. The
miracle of her story is in her heart's transformation. Kaye
Gibbons's novels have the compact detail of folk art, without
any of the corn, James Wolcott wrote in The New Yorker.
Her latest creation features the moving portrayal of a strong
and proud heroine who digs beneath the quotidian surface of
her life to uncover an extraordinary world.
