While the Music Plays

Although the publisher is calling this an historical romance, it's really a historical novel, and a fine one at that. Setting her story in the Confederate capital of Richmond and peopling it with real (Jefferson and Varina Davis) and fictitious characters, Austell brilliantly depicts the cruel costs of the bitter North-South schism on both home front and battlefield. Yankee Chase Girard, Union army spy, recruits Laura Chandler, young widow of a U.S. senator, for the Northern cause. Seduced by the man as well as by his antislavery, pro-Union arguments, she loses her heart. When Chase must flee or face hanging, Laura's life changes forever. Avoiding comparisons with Gone with the Wind is generally a good policy, but in this case the comparison is apt. Austell (Lights Along the Shore) has managed to bring to her Civil War novel the narrative power and flow of Margaret Mitchell's ur-text. (Nov.)