The first 50 pages were extremly slow, and thought about giving up a few times. I'm so glad I didn't because I ended up enjoying it. Although, I was a little sad at the end when Inman dies. I didn't have very high expections for the film, but was pleasntly surprised.

A war novel told without any battle scenes. Instead the author shows the human side of war -- the hourly struggle for existance, the loss of trust, the greed & betrayals the desolation that occurs when there is a breakdown of law & order & everyone is engaged in a life & death struggle to survive. Out of this comes a love story, told in 2 alternating voices with an ending both tragic & inevitable.

Beautifully written, slow moving (in a good, dreamy, one-with-nature way) and infinitely better than the movie - I can't recommend this book enough. I read the whole thing on a plane home from abroad - which is probably the perfect way to read a book about an endless journey home to the people you love.

This novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home. Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves. Ada, who was raised in genteel society, cannot cope with the rigors of war until a woman called Ruby arrives to help her. Inman comes across memorable characters like the goatwoman, who lives off the secret herbs in the woods and Sara, a woman stranded with an infant who is assaulted by Yankee soldiers whom Inman later kills. After a long journey, Inman finally arrives home to Ada, "ravaged, worn ragged and wary and thin." His momentary homecoming, however, comes to a tragic end.

Except for the characters Inman meets during his journey home, this is one instance where I found the movie to be better than the book.

Feb - March 2008 - read all 1024 pages. It took about 7 weeks to do it.

This is one of my Book Club picks, but I don’t think we realized it was a final book of a quartet. It opens in 1854 and slavery is under fire by abolitionists and Northern politicians. The Browning, Mackay and Stiles families wrestle with the painful possibility of Southern secession. Mark Browning, a Yankee from Philadelphia, feels like a stranger in his beloved Savannah; he and his fiery wife Caroline are at loggerheads, and even their son Jonathan decides he must fight for the South.

Daughter Natalie and her husband Burke are bolstered in their sympathy for the Union by their daughter's love for a boy who slips past Southern lines to fight for the North. Eliza Mackay, a true Southerner, sets polite society on its ear by siding with her good friend Mark. And while the Stileses--stiff-necked Miss Lib and blustering W. H.--initially see only honor in the fight to come, its bloody reality crushes their hopes. I found that endless parlor scenes and flowery, sentimental dialogue make the first half of this over-padded novel drag, but Price gains momentum when she writes of how the Civil War broke the hearts of Rebels and Yankees alike.

As interested as I am in Lincoln biographies, I thought this one was not as interesting. It skipped around and I had trouble getting a linear story either of depression or Lincoln from it. I both liked and disliked the technique of giving a bit of Lincoln biography followed by some psycology. It was more interesting than if it had been done otherwise, but I felt like it was almost two isolated stories rather than one narrative around Lincoln.
I almost felt that is was written just to write another biography of Lincoln. Kudos for trying something new, but there is so much better Lincoln material out there.

audio: october 2007

Although all of the stories come together in the end, I had trouble putting them into context in relation to one another. I had trouble figuring out who the characters were and how they fitted in with each other. That made it hard for me to connect with or feel sympathy for the people in the stories.

It would probably help if I had not taken a break in the middle of the book, coming back to it a week or so later.

I loved that this book was not all sentimental about the Spanish Civil War, but was just a description of the way things were. Extremely interesting pictures of what Spain was like at that time.
I don't know much about the Spanish Civil War, so some of the explanations of what was happening went over my head.
Amazing to me that people traveled that way, which I think is pretty unthinkable today.

Fans of Dallas's previous novels (The Diary of Mattie Spenser, The Persian Pickle Club) will not be disappointed here. Alice is a young woman whose husband of one year has just joined the Union army and left her alone with his forbidding mother on the family farm. Told in letters to her sister, Alice's story is at first one of everyday hardships and small triumphs but soon turns darker when she is suspected of murder. As an outsider who married into the small, tight-knit community of Slatyfork, she would have required much less than the suspicion of murder to turn her neighbors against her. Her one solace is quilting, and each chapter begins with an explanation of a quilting pattern that is then incorporated into the story. Day-to-day life during the Civil War is well represented, with the ever-present fear of looters, food shortages, and worry for the absent men. Above all, there is Alice, a plucky heroine if ever there was one, and readers will cheer her on. I loved the way much of the story was told in letters. Sandra Dallas is a good story-teller -- her books are simple but good.

For the most part this book is more like a crime novel. It has some dry sections especially toward the end. But I found it very interesting--not the stuff you learn in school.

How did a man who was extremely famous, whose face was so well know, murder the president in front of an entire theater of people, and then elude the manhunters for 12 days? This book follows the murder of Lincoln and the attempted murder of Seward and the events that followed. In great detail, he outlines all of their activities and how they were finally caught.
This was a great book to follow A Team of Rivals.