Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0099481529, Paperback)
From the author of international bestseller
Star of the Sea comes this tale of hatreds and mercies, of balladry and the blues, war and peace. It is an epic novel and an unforgettable love story.
1865: The American Civil War is ending. Eliza Duane Mulvey sets out from Lafayette, Louisiana, the town her mother Mary Duane called home. Alone, she walks across a devastated country in search of a youngster she has not seen in four years. One of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war, his fate has been mysterious and will prove extraordinary.
It’s a walk that will have consequences for many seemingly unconnected survivors: a love-struck cartographer, a beautiful Latina poetess, rebel guerrilla Johnny Thunders, runaway slave Grace McNeile, the mercurial revolutionary Giacomo O’Keefe, who commanded a brigade of Irish immigrants in the Union Army and is now Governor of a western wilderness where nothing is as it seems.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400)
The language in the first chapter is as dense and deliberately confusing as anything I've read; and once you're past that the story itself is given depth by letters, interviews and handbills. All of which makes for a book you need to concentrate on. Added to this O'Connor allows for different points of view and so different realisations of the same event which means the plot isn't a straight forward one.
But for me that was a real joy. This a novel that makes you think, allows your imagination a part in the process and encourages ambiguity. (