MRS. LINCOLN'S DRESSMAKER by Jennifer Chiaverini

Elizabeth Keckley is a former slave who worked hard to buy freedom for herself and her son.  Now she’s an accomplished seamstress in the nation’s capital as the country teeters toward civil war.  Her beautiful work brings her to the attention of Mary Todd Lincoln, and soon she is dressing the First Lady and occasionally trying to tame the President’s unruly hair.  As frivolous as this premise may sound, the story is really quite serious, as Elizabeth becomes Mrs. Lincoln’s confidante and helps soothe her grief when the Lincolns lose their beloved son Willie.  Elizabeth’s friendship becomes even more important after the President’s assassination, as Mrs. Lincoln is devastated and almost destitute.  Elizabeth goes too far in her efforts to assist Mrs. Lincoln, at the expense of her own welfare.  Elizabeth generally gives Mrs. Lincoln excellent advice, which Mrs. Lincoln often fails to follow, but Elizabeth makes some monumentally poor decisions for her own life, one of which costs her almost everything but makes this book possible.  Elizabeth’s story is one worth telling, deserving of better treatment, but this novel reads like very dry non-fiction.  The history covered here is mostly familiar, and the author doesn’t bring any suspense to Elizabeth’s story, either, which is relatively unknown.  Plus, the prose is pretty basic and uninspired.  Gore Vidal’s Lincoln is a better read, although longer and denser.  And, yes, Elizabeth Keckley appears in that novel as well.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead

Prepare to be horrified while reading this book, but then slavery WAS horrifying.  Cora is a young slave on a Georgia plantation and is still angry at her mother for running off when Cora was 10.  When another slave urges Cora to join him in an escape attempt, she finally agrees.  She suffers mightily while on the run and even catches herself wishing she were back on the plantation from time to time.  Although the Underground Railroad was not literally a system of trains running in dark tunnels underneath the earth, that’s exactly what it is in this book.  The trains don’t have set schedules, and the passengers don’t necessarily know where they’re headed.  Cora finds that she can never become complacent, because peace and safety are always short-lived, since she is, and always will be, a runaway.  This era reminds me so much of the Holocaust, where the runaway and the persons trying to hide the runaway are all punished, often by a grisly death, when a hideout is discovered.  I particularly liked how the author supplied the backstory for other characters, even after we knew they had met some terrible fate.  Cora’s mother’s story is particularly surprising.  If you’re looking for a book about redemption or even one with happy endings for everybody, this is not the book for you.  The evil characters in the book are not going to suddenly become abolitionists.  Instead they keep popping up, relentlessly bent on destroying the black population or collecting a reward, more and more venomous each time we encounter them.  There are some good people in the book, including a few whites who are sympathetic to the slaves’ cause.  For Cora to survive, she will require a lot of luck, particularly with regard to timing and to the people she meets, and a lot of courage.  She certainly has the latter, but her luck waxes and wanes as she tries to negotiate the minefield that the South was during this period.

RHETT BUTLER'S PEOPLE by Donald McCaig

Frankly, my dear, this book was not what I expected.  The title led me to believe it was a prequel, but actually it's a retelling (and continuation) of Gone With the Wind from another perspective, though not always Rhett's.  If you're a huge GWTW fan, then you will probably either love or hate this novel.  If you love all things associated with GWTW, then this novel will give you more to love.  If you're more of a GWTW snob and think GWTW is the greatest love story ever written, then you'll probably think this novel pales in comparison.  As for me, I liked it but didn't love it, and I could say the same about the original, which, honestly I don't remember all that well.  I did look forward to the scene where Scarlett visits Rhett in jail in her green velvet dress that she fashioned from Tara's drapes, but knowing almost everything that was going to happen detracted from my enjoyment quite a bit.  This author knows his Civil War history, and that aspect may have been better fleshed out here, but I'm really more interested in why Scarlett swooned over the very boring Ashley Wilkes.  Her relationship with Rhett is tricky and is definitely of the love-hate variety.  For some reason, their clawing at each other here reminded me of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with all the jealousy but not the drinking.  As expected, this book is more politically correct than the original, thank heavens, without soft-pedaling on the racial horrors of the times.  Rhett is our dashing, charismatic hero throughout, walking a tightrope between his condemnation of slavery and his love for the South.

LINCOLN by Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal just passed away, and I realized that I had never read one of his books.  I had a copy of Lincoln and decided that now was the time to tackle it.  Historical fiction has the advantage (or disadvantage, in some cases) of a known outcome.  We know who's going to win the Civil War, but getting there seems almost impossible, given the Union's paucity of capable generals, the infighting among political leaders competing for Lincoln's job, the leakage of military plans to the Confederacy, and the bogus intelligence about the size of the Southern forces from obviously unreliable sources.  The book is overly long, but then there's a lot going on, including the plot by local Confederate sympathizers to kidnap or assassinate Lincoln.  The White House residents are aware that they may have to evacuate at any moment, given their proximity to the seceded state of Virginia.  Lincoln's wife's extravagance and migraines add to Lincoln's woes that include attempts to depose him for incompetence.  Eventually his foes in Congress and in his own Cabinet realize that Lincoln is the consummate politician who is wily enough to outsmart them and powerful enough to push them out of his way.  Some of his plans never come to fruition, due to his untimely death.  His ideas of reimbursing the slaveowners and relocating the slaves to Central America were not popular with his colleagues, but I couldn't help but wonder if the Reconstruction era could have been even more chaotic if he had lived.  One thing that I found disconcerting was that the author switched subjects or perspectives rather abruptly, and I had quite a bit of difficulty keeping the long list of characters straight.  No matter.  This book reads like a novel and reminds us that issues such as the size of the national debt and the separation of church and state are not new.  Imagine our current problems compounded by war on our own soil.  This book gives a glimpse of what was truly a turbulent time.

ALL OTHER NIGHTS by Dara Horn

Jacob, a Union soldier during the Civil War, receives two unusual commands from his superior officers. The first is to murder his uncle in New Orleans, a Confederate slave-owner, who is plotting to assassinate Lincoln. The second is to marry Eugenia, the daughter of a Virginia businessman, who is an associate of Jacob's father. Eugenia, or Jeannie, as her family calls her, is suspected of passing Union secrets to the Confederacy, and Jacob will ostensibly put a stop to that activity once she becomes his wife. What's unusual here is that all of these characters are Jews, as is the Secretary of State for the Confederacy, Judah Benjamin, who also plays a role in the story. One of the most ironic scenes in the novel is during the Passover Seder where Jacob plans to poison his uncle. Slaves prepare and serve the dinner, even as the uncle is reading from the Haggadah about the liberation of the Jews from Egypt. Another theme is that of family loyalty versus patriotic duty, and Horn is a little heavy-handed in pointing this out. I don't really mind, though, because I'm not that proficient at reading between the lines. I especially enjoyed the intrigue—wondering who sympathizes with which side in the war, who's dead and who's not, and if Jacob the guilt-ridden spy will be found out. I also enjoyed reading about the coding of messages and hiding them inside baked goods. Jeannie's sister Rose speaks almost exclusively in palindromes, and that's cute at first but tiresome later for both the reader and Jacob. There's also the occasional anagram. I like puzzles, but this aspect of the book was a little too much like The Poisonwood Bible, or even The Da Vinci Code, for me. The book rides high on a good plot, though, and there is lots of plotting by the characters as well, especially those of the Booth variety.