Overview

John Gore is eighteen years old in 1862 rural Kentucky. He has struggled his entire life with stuttering and the ridicule associated with it. Unable to speak well, he has focused on writing. Seeing the opportunity for advancement in the military--and with it, respect--John joins the Union army. Unfortunately, his stuttering prevents him from warning a friend of an enemy attack and John watches his friend die. He is racked with guilt and the fear that others saw him fail at the key moment . . . a fear that proves prescient.John soon meets a girl, but they must forge a friendship and then courtship through letters, allowing him to express to her what he can't say in person. Meanwhile at home, John's impetuous younger brother causes trouble with garrisoned Union troops angry at Southern sympathizers.

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9781733525220

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Our Town Book Review April 9, 2019 If you think the description of this book sounds as if someone just stuck together a book of Civil War letters, you are mistaken. This is a heart-warming, heart-wrenching story. With an historical fiction genre, it is often my nature to look up dates mentioned. Not to check anyone's accuracy since it is fiction, but I like to see if the events involved are approximate. Especially when a story includes the events of the Civil War. Even though this is fiction many of the statements are factual, the battle dates, the looting, the poverty, the atrocities committed by some people and the goodness of others. I want to add that I don't think I would call this the YA genre. It was thoroughly enjoyable and as I have said before, I'm an adult as often as I must be, and it never lost my interest. To give you an idea of this story...this is a group of letters between a soldier and his younger brother. He did not want to try and keep a diary so asked his brother who was too young and still at home on the farm, to save everything so that he had something in writing of his picture of the war. While this may seem like I am describing a diary, it's format also looks that way. But looks can be deceiving and this book has so much more. It points out the many hardships that the Civil War brought to both enlisted men and to their families. There's some history, some lessons to be learned, and some thought-provoking ideas. All these letters really make a small history book. If you get the impression that I really felt this was non-fiction it's because it was so very lifelike that I forgot it was a story, a good story but what seemed almost biographical. That makes J. Edward Gore a pretty good storyteller doesn't it? Gore's presentation of the letters made his characters real. It became the story of what must have been the true thoughts of both a soldier away from home and a young boy living a childhood, missing his brother. This story doesn't always turn out the way we might want stories to, and it is most certainly full of some ugly violence; not graphic, just ugly truth. It is however full of verbal pictures of many facets of the Civil War. Things in my opinion we shouldn't forget.

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