The Widow of the South

Southern Living Selects The Widow of the South BY ROBERT HICKS (WARNER BOOKS, $24.95)

Robert Hicks begins his fictional account with a remarkable historical figure, Carrie McGavock. The real-life mistress of Carnton plantation, which was commandeered by the Confederate Army as a hospital, saved the wounded and comforted the dying after thousands of soldiers were bloodied at her doorstep during the Battle of Franklin on November 30,1864. When a crass neighbor plans to plow the final resting place of the Franklin fallen, Carrie solidifies her title as the "Widow of the South." She and her husband, John, reinter the remains on McGavock land. For the rest of her life, Carrie tends the Carnton graveyard, the nation's largest private military cemetery.

Hicks expands this intriguing slice of the past into a full-blown saga of fiction so moving that it seems as if he channels Carrie in the telling. In his version, she loves her good-hearted yet weak husband; grieves the early deaths of three of her five children; finds a passionate, if chaste, relationship with a wounded soldier; and reaches an understanding about life on Earth through death in war. The author's strong, believable characters deserve a place in memory as surely as those soldiers the real Carrie commemorated. -NANCY DORMAN-HICKSON

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