Red Moon at Sharpsburg

Short (I hope) bit of preamble, in two initially separate directions. Yesterday, March 10th, was the day on which my father died in 1966 and on which my grandfather also died, five years later. I liked them both, a lot, and more relevantly here, both were big readers, and both helped foster my early book-wormery. According to my mother, my father introduced my grandfather to Anthony Trollope, and my grandfather got my dad fascinated with the American Civil War. Trollope's not so much to the point, as I haven't done much about reading him since a bit of dipping after the BBC serializations back in the -- ? 70s? -ish, but the Civil War is. Rosemary Wells intersects with children's reading and me through some of the favourite picture books I read many, many times to my own two, including Max and Ruby's First Greek Myth, Shy Charles, Hazel's Amazing Mother, and the Bunny Planet books.  So when I heard Wells had written a book about the Civil War, I was well surprised, but knew it was a must-read. 

Red Moon at Sharpsburg is quite a short book, though it takes India Moody from just before the start of the war to just before its end.  Some of that brevity comes from jumps in action that I found a bit disconcerting at first, until I put them in place with a picture book's page-turning, scene-changing nature.  And I thought I was going to be thrown out of the book early on by reading that a neighbour boy, Emory, had 'asthma', which I was convinced was a later word (OED-online proved me very, very wrong on that one) - steepholm took a quick skim while he was here and thought  'white trash' was similarly a term in use only later - he was also wrong, if less dramatically so.  (The author writes in an afterword that she spent 12 years researching the era, and I can well believe it.)  I soon felt I'd fallen into the rhythm of the book, which is rather different  - generally quite spare, but with lovely passages, and a conversational feel I quickly warmed to.  In terms of the author's stated intent of writing a book about the Civil War which told stories of  people's lives and also revealed the 'profound immorality of war', in a way appropriate for younger readers, I'd say she was fully successful.  I might have criticisms - mostly minor ones- but they're out-weighed by the positives.

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If some of it might be a smidge improbably forward-thinking for the time (India is determined to go to Oberlin College, to study science, and Emory teaches her science, until he goes to be a military doctor, hoping to do something to change the woefully unhygienic medical practices which killed so many), there were of course people that forward-thinking, if well-diluted among the majority.  And this is one of the big questions about historical fiction, to which I keep returning: is it a bad thing to endow your major character(s) with more enlightened views than are shared by the vast majority of the people of the time, or is it a valid technique for engaging with attitudes which the majority of present-day readers will find abhorrent?   It's probably more common to have a female protagonist who's refusing to accept the 'proper', 'natural' role of women in society, as is found here, than any other possibly anachronistic views, but that doesn't mean it has to be done clumsily.  And if it's carefully done, as here, where an ahead-of-its-time institution like Oberlin becomes a goal for a girl who can't stand the idea of becoming merely a 'proper' woman and giving up learning, then it can help readers to understand how things were for a given group of people at a given time, and especially how they might have been for the minority that couldn't live happily with the generally-accepted. (Clumsily done - well, not good.)  At least, that's my take today and after this book...