In this complex historical drama, school teacher Agnes Canon, refusing her father’s choice for a husband, leaves the safety of her Pennsylvania childhood home for the wilds of Missouri in the decade before the outbreak of the Civil War. On the way she meets, and eventually weds, Jabez Robinson, a medical man who has seen the wonders of the world and war at its foulest. Living in a territory with loyalties on both sides as the national conflict heats up, Jabez and Agnes, equally matched in intellect and stubbornness, abhor the Southern institution of slavery, but also despise the greed and interference of the North. Their struggles are real, and the chaos endured will pit their marriage against a dramatically changing civilization.

Agnes is the pivotal character in this multi-layered story. She endures the pangs of childbirth and the deprivations of family life in a war zone. She watches as friends and neighbors go different ways in the war, and good men fight each other on the home front. She supports Jabez even as his publicly stated political ideals open them to harassment from violent, unprincipled militants.

Deborah Lincoln, who has based this novel on the life history of her great grandparents, writes with emotional intensity about dark times in an embattled landscape. Unlike many Civil War sagas, this one takes no obvious sides. The focus is on Agnes—a vital, strong woman with feminist ideals, and Jabez, the only man smart and determined enough to gain her love. The romance is not overdrawn, though, and there is a complex skein of subplots providing scenes of rousing action and rich historical context.

Agnes Canon’s War reminds us that war produces equal measures of bravery and barbarism, and those in its midst who hang on to their principles are rare and admirable. An excellent book that explores love and societal schisms grown in the roots of cultural and political battles between the North and the South. A great read.

Boom Baby Reviews

Heartbreakingly Realistic & Well Portrayed

This book reminded me a lot of ‘Centennial,’ and I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I mean the mini-series from the ‘70s rather than the book. I have yet to manage a sojourn through Michener’s epic (and epically sized) work. But my mother loved the mini-series, so I watched it a lot when I was younger and I still enjoy it. Anyways, what I mean by that is that this felt like a story as much about its setting as the “main” characters; perhaps more about the setting.

We do follow Agnes Canon and Jabez Robinson, and their families and their lives together, but we also follow a town and a state and a people over the course of more than ten years. And when talking about the 1850s and 1860s in America, what a ten years that was. We follow the years that led up to and then through the Civil War, but what makes this book interesting in that is that it’s set in Missouri. It was a much “greyer” area between people siding with the unionists versus the secessionist, the slave-holders versus the abolitionists. It was more divided and less decided than the far north or deep south. So for a book about the civil war, and for a girl with family in Alabama and Connecticut, it provided a different perspective than I usually get and I liked that.

This was a very good book. It was very readable. The way it moved through time–fitting so many years into a three hundred page book–could be a little jarring, but not that bad. Even if you looked at the surroundings and the setting more than the people, you still felt the people. You still got into the characters.

Agnes was an interesting portrait of what a woman was expected to be in her day and age and the modern way that women reading these books today wish those historical figures had been like. Jabez showed the general restlessness of much of America, and all those who moved west to the uncharted areas. And in them and through them, we see a lot of the fuzzy lines of that time period.

Overall, this story was…heartbreakingly realistic. There were some scenes that were very difficult to read and, yes, made me cry. But they were true to the day they lived in, and well portrayed. And the fact that this story was based on some of the author’s personal lineage makes it all the more fascinating.