Well y’all, I’ve done it again. I found another piece of sniveling, self-serving garbage. I finished this one out of spite. I wanted very badly, much like Signature of All Things, to cast this garbage into the sea. Unlike that previous disaster, I could not bring myself to punish the environment with this piece of “not all confederates” garbage. Charles Frazier spent a mind-numbing 353 pages elaborating on what could have been a pamphlet – “Varina Davis was a lady that had ideas outside of her husband’s thoughts”. Varina, wife of Jefferson Davis, gets the “smart lady that everyone is jealous of treatment” via anecdotes of her spaaaaarkling wit, her exooooootic feautres, and her looooooooove of ancient poetry in the original language. Ugh. It was another adventure in “look how enlightened this person is” that was built, not by action, but by lists of people they knew and books that they read.
I can get all worked up about this lazy story telling (am I really surprised? Cold Mountain was…fine. and a fluke), but what I would really like to spend my time raging about was this 353 page tome of why we should feel bad for the queen of the goddamn confederacy. We’re supposed to believe that this woman, her husband, his whole family, and everyone else that they ever came across was not really a racist, because they were all GOOD FRIENDS with their SLAVES. GOOD FRIENDS with the people that they OWNED. They were all NICE to the people that they considered THINGS and therefore they were all to be forgiven for the unforgivable situations that they charged into head-first with fists held high into the sky. Oh yes, and other people were mean to THEM- these FINE PEOPLE who were DEFENDING THE CONSTITUTION- in this day and age I cannot begin to consider the number of people responsible for allowing this book to be made without becoming apoplectic. I cannot type it out, so go ahead and imagine a scream here. Do not read this book.