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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Southern Heart, December 1, 2001
Caroline Miller's Lamb In His Bosom is a truly beautiful read. The unforgettable characters, the story line, the beautiful prose and dialect, all these make it the perfect book about the South and Southerners.
The book is set in Georgia about twenty years before the War Between the States, and eventually leads up to the War. The story revolves around the life and thoughts of Cean Smith (nee Carver), and how she manages as a young wife and mother in the Georgia backwoods. Her life is marked by hard work, love for her husband, and birthing, raising, and burying her babies.
I was first struck by the dialect. The more I read, the more I recognized my own mother's speech patterns and idioms. I should have expected as much, seeing as she was born and raised in a Kentucky holler, in a situation not far removed from that of Lamb's Cean and Lonzo. From the book's excellent afterward (which describes Miller's research technique), as well as from numerous contemporaneous reviews, the dialect in Lamb is probably the best record available of pre-War Between the States Southern speech, and the book therefore has historical value. Attempts by authors to portray "Southern-speak" usually come off as irritating, even insulting, poor imitations of a "Hee-Haw" script. But Miller makes the dialect not only effective, she makes it beautiful and even honorable.
The story line has several elements to commend the book. First is the utter believablity of the situations. There is nothing outrageous about the vicissitudes encountered by these characters. The power of the story is contained in large measure in the very plainess of life in the setting. Life for these folks is a few years of hard toil to scratch out an existence that is punctuated by brief moments of happiness and made joyful by enduring family ties and precious generational memories. Most prevalent in the story is the ubiquitous presence of death, which spares neither the elderly, the middle-aged, and especially the children and babies. The story made me remember the grave yards at my Alma Mater in southern Virginia, where the grave markers tell a story of a time when families had more deceased children than most people today have living relatives. And in this is the Southern heart most eloquently displayed in Lamb, for every passing is, of course, cause for mourning, but is also occasion to remember the blessing that death has become, as it is the Door that leads to the long hoped for encounter with the Great Maker, Redeemer, and Disposer of All. In Lamb, dread death is not feared as it gives way to Blessed Transfiguration.
Lamb In His Bosom has a rightful place in the Southern Canon. The story is unique; it has no real plot sublety or intricacy; it has none of disturbing Gothicity of O'Connor, none of the flagellation of Faulkner, none of the contrived humor of Welty. This in NO WAY is a diminution of those great Southern writers. Rather, it is a confirmation of the Southern Character and Ethos of seeing God and nature as good and living in close connection to both even in the face of hardship and death, loving our living, and honoring our dead. Lamb In His Bosom deserves to read, carefully and quietly. It is a book that is beautifully simple and simply beautiful, just like the South and Southerners.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lamb in His Bosom, September 15, 2003
Lamb in His Bosom! What do you think, when you first hear this title? Most people just think Lamb in His Breast. And for the people who just look at the cover, and don't look at the book ever again, that is all it means. However, if you actually read the book based in Southern Georgia, you learn it's a lot more. You learn that the book travel's through Cean, her husband Lonzo, and the rest of her family; it is a journey for the reader to embark on, one that they will never forget.The story starts out twenty or so years before the Civil War and ends at the end of the Civil War. Through out the novel, you become very close to Cean, and her family which varies so differently person to person. Caroline Miller, the author, write so beautifully in the novel that the black marks on the page seem like people standing next to you for the past twenty years. You'll find yourself slumped in your chair crying over sad events, and at other times on the edge of your seat in great anxiety to move on. Perhaps it is not just the characters that draw you into the book, but the stories/lessons you get from the book. This book is not like the classic type of story with a begining, middle, and end. It is more of just a lot of small stories, so wonderfully woven into one big story. You can tell Miss Miller spent much time writing this, and it took many interviews with people to get the story just the way she wanted it. One last thing I want to comment on before I wrap this review up, is the use of language in the novel. To put it plain and simple, a historian of the pre-Civil War times put Caroline Miller's Lamb in His Bosom, as the "most accurate literature of the time." Overall, the book is terrific. The only bad thing about the novel, is that it ends. Though it is a lengthy 340+ page book, you'll find yourself staying up countless amounts of hours, just reading "one more chapter." It is a shame that this, along with one more novel was the only novels that Caroline Miller had published, though she reportedly had manuscripts never published.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lamb in his Bosom, December 9, 1999
I read this book years ago... as a college project to read classic, but little known writers. It was often called "THE POOR MAN'S GONE WITH THE WIND". It has the flavor of the recent book, COLD MOUNTAIN because it does not romantize the South or the Civil War. The writing is very descriptive and the pity is that Caroline Miller never wrote another book.
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