Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Ninety-five-year-old Lucy Marsden tells of her marriage at 15 to 50-year-old Civil War veteran ``Captain'' Marsden, who, permanently traumatized by events he witnessed, makes a lifetime career of reminiscing about the conflict and collecting weapons to memorialize it. PW concluded that, despite some overwritten sections, this long novel is ``an unforgettable reading experience.'' Author tour. (Oct.)
Library Journal
Ninety-nine year old Lucille Marsden, confined to a charity nursing home in North Carolina, is an American cousin of Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle. Lucy tells the story of her marriage to ``Captain'' Will Marsden, ostensibly the Civil War's last survivor, whom she married when she was 15 and he was more than triple her age. She also tells about her husband's experiences in the war and after, the burning of her mother-in-law's plantation by Sherman's men, and the abduction from Africa of a former Marsden slave, midwife to Lucy's nine children as well as her best friend. But this novel is less about the War Between the States than about the war between the sexes. And, like Finnegan's Wake , it's also about how history is recorded and about how lives are turned into stories. Lucy's voice casts a spell as enchanting as Scheherazade's; a first novel to be slowly savored and richly enjoyed. BOMC selection.-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
From the Publisher
"Bawdy, raucous, comic... The story of the South in all its tragic and self-perceived glory."
--The Boston Globe
"An old-fashioned book-lovers? novel."
--Chicago Tribune
"A big book in every way, one hell of an American novel."
--San Francisco Chronicle
