Years ago I read and really liked Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, so I was pleased to have a chance to read his earlier book In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, not least because this solved the mystery of Ayers’ otherwise puzzling decision to start The Thin Light of Freedom smack dab in the middle of the war.

But either Ayers really grew as a historian between the two books, or I’ve gained a lot of Civil War knowledge since I read The Thin Light of Freedom, or possibly both. I found In the Presence of Mine Enemies much less interesting and insightful than The Thin Light of Freedom.

However, it did spark off a number of thoughts, none of which are things that the book exactly explores in itself, so this is not so much a review as a couple of things that it made me think about.

1. The beginning of a popular war apparently feels just terrific. I’ve read this sort of thing about the beginning of World War I, too (or America’s entry into World War I), where you’ve had months of lead-up, ages of aching tension, furious argument on all sides, and suddenly the war is declared and everything seems clean and clear and unanimous and everyone is running through the streets waving flags and singing patriotic songs and throwing tomatoes at the windows of the few old windbags who are muttering “This isn’t going to be as much fun as you think.”

This lasts until the first defeat (if that long), at which point everyone realizes that the war is indeed NOT going to be as fun as they think, and also all those political divisions that it seemed like the war had transcended are back! and more furious than ever! and somehow we have to deal with that while also fighting a war! Because of course you are still stuck with the war after the first euphoric glow wears off.

2. Every war is different, and presumably there have been wars where crusty old geezers send innocent young men to die for fun and profit, but in the Civil War at least the young men were wildly in favor of going to war while the old men were, overall, the ones going “But have we considered NOT going to war.”

I say this because there seems to be something of a canard that young men go to war because they have been duped by old ones, and in this case if they were duped by anyone it was by themselves and their own conviction that they could whip Those Dirty Whosits by Christmas.

Not so long ago, skygiants acquired Frances Mary Hendry’s Quest for a Kelpie, which is about a girl during the Jacobite uprising of 1745 who is fated by a seer to meet with someone four times.

“Hmmm,” we said. “This sounds similar to D. K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron!”

Conveniently, I just recently unpacked the paper copy of Flight of the Heron that I found at John K. King Books in fall of 2023, and felt like rereading it anyway because I’d never read it on paper before, so I gave it a spin before skygiants sent me Quest for a Kelpie.

Although it is of course possible that Frances Mary Hendry read Flight of the Heron at some point, I wouldn’t bet on it based on Quest for a Kelpie. Although the two books have the same setting and almost the same premise (in Flight of the Heron it’s five meetings instead of four, of course), their thematic preoccupations are completely different.

Flight of the Heron is interested in honor, particularly the moments when honor and duty clash with desire and prudence - not just in the repeated meetings of Ewen and Keith, but in Lochiel’s decision to rise for the Prince because he promised his support, even though he knows that the Prince’s choices have made this particular rising unlikely to succeed. It’s interested in people on opposing sides of a war who would have been friends under different circumstances. And, of course, gorgeous men being wounded and tenderly nursed back to health by a friend in a desperate situation.

Quest for a Kelpie is interested in women’s work, work in general and the way that small subsistence-level communities survive, the effect of war on the poor who have little say in whether war comes or not, the devastation wrought by war (to be fair, Flight of the Heron is cognizant of this too; it’s not a main theme, but it comes up insistently nonetheless), the fact that we are all human despite divides of class or caste or race, and the way this is so easy to forget and the forgetting so easily leads to our devastation.

( Spoilers )

This was Hendry’s first book, and it’s not as polished and memorable as Quest for a Maid. (I can’t be the only one who thought of Quest for a Maid and the heroine’s streak of white hair where her witch sister struck her when I first saw Frozen.) But it’s thematically resonant with the later book, and shares many of the same overriding preoccupations.

Quest for a Maid was the only Hendry published in the US, so Quest for a Kelpie is hard to come by. Would anyone like my copy? I’d be happy to mail it within the US.

Yesterday evening, I decided I might as well get started on my 2025 Newbery reading, and picked up Kate O’Shaughnessy’s The Wrong Way Home to read a couple of chapters before bed. Then I read the whole book in one sitting, and lay awake for the next three hours or so thinking about it.

This is particularly impressive because I felt lukewarm about the premise of the book. Our heroine Fern starts off in a back-to-nature cult in New York, only to be yoinked out by her mother who drives her across the country to California to start a new, mainstream life.

Now, I love cult stories, but to be honest I’m much more interested in the cult aspect than the “return to mainstream life” thing. I know what mainstream life is like. I want to read about a day in the life of the cult, I want cult rituals, I want a deep dive into cult beliefs. My favorite cult story is the movie Midsommar, which ends with Dani ecstatically joining the cult of flower-bedecked Swedish human sacrificers. I mean, yes, technically bad, but don’t we all practice a spot of human sacrifice from time to time – what is the death of the uninsured but a human sacrifice on the altar of Freedom and Capitalism! – and, more importantly, Dani feels held by them.

The Wrong Way Home grasps that in order for Fern (and the reader) to root for Fern to stay out here, she has to find a mainstream community that she also feels held by, without the cult drawbacks of “when you come of age you have to go on a coming of age ritual which might kill you.” Driftaway Beach is Fern’s mother’s tiny oceanfront California hometown, and although her mother’s parents died long ago, her godmother Babs is still there, running an extremely pink teashop called Birdie’s after her dead wife.

Then Fern starts school. She’s much more enthusiastic about this once she realizes the school has computers, which she can use to help her find the Ranch’s address so she can write to Dr. Ben to come save her. And her science teacher is pretty cool, and really concerned about the environment in a way that makes Fern realize that you can care about the environment and also NOT live in an isolated rural compound that you never ever leave, and she starts to make friends, and also Babs invites her to come to the teashop for treats anytime she wants, on the house, and she hasn’t had sugar in years and the petit fours completely blow her mind…

But she still really misses her friends back home at the Ranch, and the chickens and the forest and the feeling of building a community that will sustain life in a future wracked by climate change and societal collapse.

And she’s also having trouble finding the Ranch on the internet, not least because she hasn’t used the internet since she moved to the Ranch when she was six. So she hires a private investigator, using money that Babs is paying her to clear out a bunch of clutter left behind by her wife’s sudden death years ago.

But earning money takes time, and a private investigation also takes time, and time is what it takes to put down roots. And when you hire a private investigator, well, he might turn up more than you’ve bargained for…

Just an incredibly readable book. I really meant to put it down and go to sleep, but I kept having to read just another chapter or two, and then somehow the book was done.