Wilderness Run

This was the kind of book that left me thoughtful and satisfied like those books I read in my teens on Saturday mornings curled up and never going downstairs to start the day. I can't wait for Hummel to write more books. She mixes insight and poetry well. It is as if she talked first hand with those who recalled specific Civil War experiences and then wrote them into this novel.

This book is a welcome new addition to Vermont fiction. As the wealthychildren of lumber barons, Isabel and Laurence Lindsey are well-drawn andwithout the stereotypical traits that sometimes accompany Vermontliterature. Rather than hard-bitten, laconic types who secretly have heartsof gold, they are real young people who make mistakes and whose innocence isshattered by the events of their time. With her lyrical descriptions of thewinter landscape and her detailed knowledge of the time period, Hummel hascreated a new and fascinating world.

there are few civil war novels that stand above the crowded field. most hobble themselves with buddy-picture-like male cameraderie that fails to invoke the true spirit of an age that at least for the middle and upper middle class was more concerned with the etherial and transcendant than back slapping brotherhood. ms. hummel evokes the suffering, the dread, the gothic din and the warmth of the period better than any recent effort.

This is a good rainy weekend book, full of enough gory battles to keep youriveted and enough warm domestic scenes to stop you from feeling guilty forsipping your third hot chocolate. Beautiful writing, great historicaldetail.

There is such beautiful writing in this book, from the first scenes on the Vermont lake through to the last moments in the Washington hospital. I felt like I traveled so far with the Lindsey family and it will be a long time before I forget Laurence and Isabel and their experiences. Despite choosing a fairly traditional character trajectory--rich young man goes off to war--Hummel has created a deeply original story about a family shattered by a pivotal moment in our country's history. It's the details that make what she writes ring true, the soldier who carves a ship piece by piece and smuggles them out to the woods to assemble, the brutal episode of capturing a hog in the forest, and on the domestic front, a girl reciting Shakespeare at a party on the day the news comes home about the rout at Bull Run. You don't have to be a Civil War buff to love this novel, but you do have to want to escape the contemporary landscape of navel-gazing relationship books into a fictional world with grand and serious scope