Once before I wrote about my book club, the Church Chicks. This month we read A Separate Country by Robert Hicks. I was to review this today. Through much persistence, I communicated with his designated person and lined him up to join us today. What a delightful time we all shared. He is the same author that penned The Widow of the South.
We learned so much of the back story as to why he would choose to write about a General we Southerners learned to sneer at...Gen. John Bell Hood. He was responsible for the carnage of the Battles of Franklin and Nashville. It seems that he was not maligned until 1938. He moved to New Orleans after the war and met and married Anna Marie Henson, a great and accomplished society lady. This story is about their lives together amidst the birth of a new country. It talks of a man who underwent a great metamorphosis as to what was really important to him. I highly recommend it.
We spent time listening to tales of Robert Hick's family. These stories could rival A Christmas Story and To Kill a Mockingbird. His grandmother was a dowager much like Maggie Smith's character on Downton Abby...I saw a lot of similarity. All in all, he delighted us for 3 hours.
How lucky we are to live in an area so rich in history! I encourage all of my followers to learn some of your back stories before it is too late. Our club leader had 6 men in her family tree that fought in The Battle of Franklin and survived. She even brought documentation in the form of a news article with their picture. Of course Hicks wants her to talk with the Franklin Preservation Society director to share her family story.
We are also blessed to live in an area so full of talented men and women who transport us to times and places unknown except for their writings. In the last two years our book club has been able to speak with four authors: Susan Gilmore, Brenda Rickman Vantrease, Lisa Patton (not the Channel 2 meteorologist), and Robert Hicks.
I hope the love of reading will continue with my children and grandchildren and their descendants. I am blessed that my grandmother loved reading and writing and instilled that in me. I remember her sending in short stories to many magazines penned from her old typewriter on the dining room table. She read Little Women to me as I would settle down in bed many nights. My aunt gave me my copy of A Separate Country a couple of years ago. My mom instilled in me the love of mysteries. As I travel through books, it brings me close to those who have gone before me. I wish you time to enjoy a good book and memories of loved ones in little ways.
