Embers of the Heart

RB is a wonderful author and her characters always reflect enormous depth. This is a very different plot. The happy young couple are separated when darryl goes off to fight in the confederacy. Anna is more pro union but tries deparately to understand and support her husbands need to fight for the south. She waits for years for him to return to her, not knowing if he's dead or alive. When she's finally trying to go on with her life, she finds out that he is alive but has become a deadly bushwhacker along with the quantril and bill anderson raiders.This devestates her. She has a tormented inner battle with herself over the love and loyalty she has towards the man she was married to and the anger and loathing she feels toward the man he's become. In the meantime a vengeful woman gets returns to his life and plots to bring out the worse in him and turns him against his wife anna. At some point anna thinking he has died remarries and her happiness is shattered when her beloved new husband (the marshall formerly chasing darryl) is mortally shot by the now insane darryl (crazy doc). Then we get into will he recover, who will find out what, is her marriage bigamous, etc....It is an epic of the tragedy of the civil war, and the hatred and viciousness that went on for years afterwards, and what that did to the men and women of that era...This is an excellent book. (If it has any flaw, I think the noble, virtuos Anna belabors the fact that she must be romantically loyal to darryl even after she knows he's become evil.)But that's easily overlooked in a book that is otherwise excellent. enjoy.

Every book of Roseanne Bittner's that I have read, I have loved and Embers of the Heart is no exception. This book fills you with every emotion at one time or another. It covers nearly ten years in the life of Anna Kelly. Starting with just before her husband goes off to fight for the Confederacy through the years in which she wonders what has become of him until the very end, when he has to pay for his crimes. Through it all, Anna becomes a strong, independent woman. As usual Ms. Bittner's novel is filled with historical accuracy and well-developed characters. This is one author, who can not write a bad book, not even a mediocre one. This book like all her others gets a five-star rating. Although this book may be hard to find, it's more than worth the trouble to find.