Customer Reviews

Child of the South

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With the Civil War over, half-breed Eugenia May Spotswood returns home searching for family especially the one her mother to belong to, but mostly finding hate between her two worlds of black and white. One noted exception is a black North Carolina senator who befriends Eugenia May giving her powerful backing.

A former slave Tom served as a spy for the Union while Clyde Bricket fought for the Confederacy. They come home to North Carolina where they meet in poverty as neither has much of anything except Tom is free and Clyde is crippled. If they can get past their prejudice and forge a team, they can rebuild their homes; separately neither can stand up to those who want the new South to remain devastated.

The sequel to THE ROAD FROM CHAPEL HILL (not read by me) is a profound look at the South struggling to recover from the ravages of the Civil War, mostly fought below the Mason-Dixon Line. The characters are fully developed so that the good, the bad, and the ugly compete for how the New South will be shaped. With more subplots than above that merge into a deep look at the aftermath of the Civil War, Joanna Catherine Scott provides a powerful historical.

Harriet Klausner

Although it stands on its own, Child of the South is a sequel to Scott's acclaimed The Road to Chapel Hill. It does not disappoint. Suspense and romance play out on the stage of post-Civil War North Carolina, hopes raised only to be dashed and raised again. There is much engrossing history here, seen through the eyes of two compelling characters: Tom (in third person) and Eugenia Mae(in first person), but never losing the luminous poetic quality for which Scott's prose is known.

"Child of the South" is a story about the aftermath of the War between the North and the South. "The Civil War" can hardly be called "civil" (as I see it) because of its loss of lives on both sides of the conflict. The author descibed the aftermath in great detail: the hostility, racial tension and hatred, the rebuilding of the south and the political unrest and differences. Then she has it intertwined with family relationships, and a love story, which is spellbinding. The characters of the ex-slave Tom; Eugenia Mae, the Mulatto girl; and Clyde Bricket, a Southern boy crippled during the war; are so lifelike, the reader feels their anguish, their fear and hope. The story partly written in the first and third person gives the novel a realistic view. I loved it from beginning till end. Great reading!