July 24, 2003
Civil War St. Louis Reviews...
"Guerrilla Season"
by Pat Hughes
Guerrilla Season
by Pat Hughes
available from Amazon.com 30% off cover price |
Guerrilla
Season
by
Pat Hughes
Fiction
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (Juv)
Release Date: August 12, 2003
ISBN: 0374328110 |
"She turned fierce new eyes on him. "I hate those
Federals.""You mustn't hate anybody," he said,
and she threw her arms around his neck, crying a summer's worth of tears.
It hurt to be hugged so tight, but he didn't care. He patted her back,
stroked her hair. What business did a little child have with hate? The
seven-year-old guerrilla sister, how hard did she hate? If it had been
Molly crushed under bricks and rubble, he would have gone and attacked
Lawrence, too. Wouldn't he?
excerpt from "Guerrilla Season" |
Reviewed by D. H. Rule
Season of light, season of darkness...
this was 1863 in Clay
County in northern Missouri. Boys hunted, swam, and played with their friends.
They also planted crops and tended to their chores. It was all normal, pastoral,
even, except at this time and in this place, nothing was normal. Everywhere and
all the time lurked the omnipresent aura of danger behind the placid green
of the woods and bushes.
The bushwhackers, guerrilla fighters for the Confederacy, hid in
the woods, striking out at the occupying Federal forces. They were a deadly
danger to any taking the Union side. To those taking the Southern side, the
perils were as great, from the Federal soldiers and the Provost Marshal
enforcing military law, often based on whim and spite. The only thing worse that
being on the side of the Rebels or the Union was to be neutral.
In this tense setting author Pat Hughes tells the story of Matt
Howard and his friend Jesse--yes, that's future outlaw Jesse James--as teenaged
boys dealing with the conflict of civil war in their own back yards, and their
own friendship in the face of conflicting loyalties. Matt Howard is a wholly
fictional character, a boy of fifteen trying to support his family after the
death of his father. He struggles to keep neutrality between north and south at
the behest of his northerner mother, yet his own leanings keep pulling him
toward the rebels. His closest friend, Jesse, clearly favors the guerrillas--his
brother, Frank "Buck" James, being one of the bushwhackers--and both boys
realize it's only a matter of time before Jesse, too, goes to the bush.
Author Pat Hughes creates a solid,
believable character of
teenaged Jesse James. In the character she brought to life, drawn from research
into the scanty contemporary information available, one can see the traits that
could lead the boy into becoming a outlaw and killer. Piously quoting the Bible
one minute, Hughes then deftly lets us see the glint of the dangerous person
Jesse would become. There might be historical room to quibble about the timeline
and sequence of events (an issue addressed by Hughes in historical notes at the
end), but the way Hughes portrays these critical events in young Jesse's life at
this time is so immensely logical and lends itself so well to the story's and character's
development that any need for dispute I had was easily pushed aside. The setting
and scenarios of 1863 Civil War Missouri appear very well researched and are
believably and adeptly portrayed.
Fictional Matt was also a fully realized character who comes to
embody the stresses at work on anyone in north-western Missouri during the Civil War. His
struggle for neutrality is thwarted by everyone around him. His friend Jesse pulls
him toward the Rebels, while Matt's mother refuses to believe in his neutrality and in
her efforts to keep him leaning toward the Union continually thrusts the label
of Rebel upon him. The Federal authorities and their treatment of suspected
southern-sympathizers do the most to push Matt toward the bushwhackers. So
conflicted was Matt, and so well done was the portrayal of his choice between
Union and Confederate that the author kept me wondering until the end which way
he would go--and satisfied me with the ultimate outcome of his choice.
In the setting comes one of the most powerful
elements of the novel.
Author Pat Hughes created a setting in which the reader can become one with the
surroundings, feeling the summer heat, hearing the leaves rustle in the trees,
and smelling the rich earth. Yet the woods--the bush--that surrounds them becomes a
character in itself. At times bright and welcoming, the bush contains always the
hint of danger, becoming a darker more threatening thing as the story
progresses. The forest becomes the representation of the conflict--always
surrounding the people, unavoidable, inescapable, and filled with lethal
unknowns.
The other characters serve the story well, with intriguing
glimpses of Jesse's mother, sister, and step-father. Matt's mother and crippled
older brother felt real and well thought-out.
The first few chapters start off a bit unevenly, with quite a
bit of expository information as the author brings the readers up to speed on
the situation. The point of view drifts a bit at this point, as well, but soon
settles down into clear, enjoyable writing that drew me deeper into the story
with each page.
Congratulations to Pat Hughes for a fine first novel in
"Guerrilla Season." It is a pleasure to recommend and I hope more by this author
will follow.
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From the webmasters of Civil War St. Louis...
Noted Guerrillas and, the extremely rare,
A Terrible Quintette
on a searchable CD-ROM:
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