MEASURE OF DEVOTION

With the American Civil War still raging, a South Carolina mother heads to the front line in Tennessee to bring home her severely injured son in Joslin’s historical novel.

It is late October, 1863, when Susannah Shelburne receives the telegram she has been dreading: Her son Francis, a Confederate soldier, has been wounded in battle. Jacob, her husband, is seriously ill, leaving her the only one who can travel to Tennessee to tend to Francis’ injuries and bring him back to Ardwyn, the family home. Susannah, the daughter of an abolitionist preacher, was only 15 years old when she married Jacob, who was 25 years her senior. He is also an abolitionist, and although he currently retains two Black servants (the elderly manservant Hawk and Letty, a personal maid to Susannah), Jacob pays them wages and has given them certificates of freedom, an arrangement necessarily kept secret from the neighbors. To Susannah and Jacob’s great dismay, Francis enlisted in the Confederate army the day he turned 18; he and his mother parted acrimoniously. Now, she heads out on the arduous journey to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, to the small farmhouse that serves as a makeshift field headquarters where Francis is located. They will spend the next five months there as she tends to his wounds, hoping to spare him the amputation of his leg. During these most difficult months of her life, she must also endure her son’s vitriol and vicious mockery. Nell’s novel is compellingly narrated by Susannah and set against the vivid backdrop of the physical, social, emotional, and familial devastations of the war. Composed in carefully textured prose filled with detailed, period-appropriate cultural minutia (“In his haversack, I found a scant handful of dried beans, another of corn kernels, and a few acorns—his sustenance for fighting all day on the side of a mountain”), the narrative reflects upon Susannah’s earlier heartbreaks even as she struggles through the current torrent of verbal abuse and physical assaults. Letty is a standout secondary character—when she eventually joins Susannah and Francis in the farmhouse, she offers support, love, hope, and critical homely wisdom in a voice seasoned by hardships.

An intense, addictive drama with a hint of light at the end of the tunnel.