I went to the Launceston 'Tassie Food Forest' on 8 July 2013 and shared my Red Mustard and Rocket greens. I can home with 'Nowhere Else on Earth' that a friend of my mother's said "You should like this, its about the Civil War in America", along with some other items. The cover drew me in - "Rhoda is the first of her family to be able to read and her parents have plans for her."
Parents usually have plans/dreams for their children. I knew mine did - go to college and become a teacher, marry and have children. But in fiction, as well as in life, those plans don't always come to the fruition expected.
The story is not any of the usual historical fiction accounts of the Civil War. Rhoda is part Indian and part Scot. No famous Confederate or Union member plays a part. Just an outcast community on the outskirts of history and the repercussions of the larger community life in war and the aftermath. Another perspective on life of the times, the hardship and struggle of war, and the capacity for human in humanity to man, as well as compassion. We do make choices.
After reading the book I looked up Josephine Humphreys on the internet. She had been a teacher, but she gave up teaching to write, as well as to care for her children. She won awards and became a recognized writer with one of her novels becoming a film.
She has lived her whole life in one town, Charleston, South Carolina. Josephine writes "...gradually became one of this old town's old-lady spies myself. In the process, the place has grown more mysterious to me, richer in connotations and complexities, more likely to make understanding impossible. At the same time, what becomes possible is a kind of minor revelation, the kind that artists and writers need from time to time. A spur, a seed, the start of something: maybe a reverie, maybe a book.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/My-Kind-of-Town-Charleston-South-Carolina.html#ixzz2Ygrx3ZVH
