Review
"The Confederate General Rides North is the compelling story of Kat McConnell, an endearing young heroine who survives life on the road with her mother by retreating into her vast knowledge of Civil War history. She reenacts battles and imagines war-torn landscapes in a way that reflects her own life while also offering escape. Amanda Gable is a first-rate storyteller and her portrayal of Kat's psychological survival on this often harrowing journey is moving and memorable." -- Jill McCorkle , author of Carolina Moon and Creatures of Habit
" I have just traveled the Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg and Manassas with eleven-year-old Katherine McConnell, the precocious and tenderhearted heroine of The Confederate General Rides North. What a trip it was! With beautiful writing and a plot that stampedes to its conclusion, author Amanda Gable poignantly navigates the bumpy roads of troubled families and the young girls who must endure them. Like the heroes who obsess her, Kat McConnell will take her place in your heart and memory." -- Betsy Carter, author of Swim to Me and The Puzzle King
"This whimsical -- and impressive -- debut novel, with its fresh, original take on a difficult mother-daughter relationship, rings true in every word. Indeed, readers everywhere will love being drawn into Gable's -- and into Katherine's -- oh-so-original world." -- Rosemary Daniell, author of Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women's Lives
Product Description
Eleven-year-old Katherine McConnell is so immersed in Civil War history that she often imagines herself a general, leading troops to battle. When Kat’s beautiful, impulsive mother wakes her early one morning in the summer of 1968 to tell her they will be taking a road trip from Georgia to Maine to find antiques for a shop she wants to open, Kat sees the opportunity for adventure and a respite from her parents’ troubled marriage. Armed with a road atlas and her most treasured history books, Kat cleverly charts a course that will take them to battlefields and historic sites and, for her mother’s sake she hopes, bring them home a success. But as the trip progresses, Kat’s experiences test her faith in her mother and her loyalty to the South, bringing her to a dif- ficult new awareness of her family and the history she reveres. And when their journey comes to an abrupt and devastating halt in Gettysburg, Kat must make an irrevocable choice about their ultimate destination.
Deftly narrated with the beguiling honesty of a child’s per- spective and set against the rich backdrop of the South during the 1960s, The Confederate General Rides North gracefully blends a complex mother-daughter relationship, the legacy of the Civil War, and the ache of growing up too soon.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Get up, baby," Mother says. "We're going on an adventure." She has my suitcase out and is already pulling clothes from my dresser drawers before I've even rolled over and put my feet on the floor. It's six a.m., still dark outside. Only a few minutes earlier I'd woken up to the noise of Daddy's truck engine turning over and over until it finally started and he revved it hard once. Now that he runs his own construction company, I never see him in the daytime unless it's Sunday. "Well, come on," Mother says. "Get dressed and help me pack your things." I wonder where we're going this time. Wherever it is, I wish we could leave later.
Yesterday Mother was touchy. Usually she likes me to be in the basement with her while she's painting, but after only a few minutes she made me pack up my watercolors because she said the way my paintbrush tapped against the jelly glass got on her nerves. Then she and Daddy had a fight at dinner, not as bad as the worst ones, but she was quiet afterward. Now her cheerfulness so early in the morning surprises me a little, except that Mother's moods can change fast. I have to watch for that. Her mood can make a difference in what I say or whether it's best to say nothing at all. The good thing is that Mother never stays mad at me for long. Like Daddy says, she shifts gears a lot. Whenever Mother gets a notion, she'll change whatever she's doing, right then and there. She'll wake me up in the middle of the night to go to Dunkin' Donuts, where we sit on the pink stools next to truck drivers and order our favorite donut, toasted coconut. She tells me she thinks best then. I like watching her sketch on the folded pieces of typing paper she brings along in her purse. In those moments it's just the two of us, like grown-ups together, and she tells me her ideas for making money. It's hard to make a living only on your art, she explains. You have to do something else to bring in steady money. And you need to make your own money, be independent, have your own bank account, she says. I don't think Daddy knows that we go; we're careful not to make noise when we leave.
Over three years ago when I was in third grade, on an October Saturday when Daddy was still a crew boss for Old Man Price, Mother packed us an overnight bag and we drove four hours to Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. "I had to see the mountains, Bill," she told Daddy on the phone in the lodge. "I wanted to see the beautiful leaves. I had to get out of there." We stayed a week. During the day we went hiking, rode horses, and drew landscapes on large sketchpads with thick sticks of charcoal Mother brought. At night we ate dinner in the lodge dining room where the tables had starched white tablecloths and napkins, and we chose books from the shelves on either side of the lodge's huge stone fireplace. I missed that whole week of school. Daddy and Mother had a huge fight in the kitchen when we got home. I heard Daddy yelling, "Damn it, Margaret, I don't care. I forbid it! You can't go off like that, spending money I don't have." He got so mad he threw a can of frozen orange juice that smashed out the kitchen window; but the next day he whistled while he put in a new windowpane, and he asked me did I have a good time, off with my wild artist mother.
As I pull on my shorts and find my favorite blue T-shirt in the pile of clothes on the floor, Mother takes my book bag out of the closet. "We're going all the way to Maine," she says. "Now that you're out of school for the summer, we can take off. Isn't this great? I've got it all planned out. We're going to buy antiques and open a store like I told you about." Mother has a lot of business ideas. Of all her plans, the antique store is my favorite -- it sounds more fun than opening an art gallery or a picture-framing shop. I love old things: the wavy grain of the wood in the pine boards of our dining room table, the marble-top dresser at Gramma's with the brass drawer pulls you can spin, or the richly colored oriental rug in my aunt's living room where I lie on my stomach to count all the tiny birds in the design.
Mother grabs my dirty-clothes bag, dumps everything out of it, and begins stuffing it with sweaters and my coat.
"Hey, why do I need those? It's summer!"
She stops stuffing for a minute. "Honey, even in the summer it gets cold at night up North. Don't you remember me telling you about Boston?" I don't remember her saying Boston's cold in the summer. I remember her stories about foot-high snowdrifts in the winter and how wonderful it was to grow up in a city where you could go to a different art museum every day of the week.
Daddy hates it when she talks about Boston. "Just quit with the Boston crap," he says. "You think anything in the North is better than everything in the South."
She tightens the drawstring of my laundry bag and lays two pairs of folded pajamas in my suitcase. "Fit in as many outfits as you can. Pick out a few school dresses."
"School dresses? I hate them."
"We might need to get dressed up some," she says firmly. "I'm going to be making contacts for my new business."
I take two jumpers, both plaid, off their coat hangers and fold them on my bed. Mother adds two white shirts to the stack. I open my desk drawer and pull out my colored pencils and sketchbook.
"Katherine, you're going to see Boston and Cape Cod and all the places I went when I was growing up." Mother's tone is soft and serious, as if she's telling me a secret.
I put my art supplies in my book bag.
"I'm so glad I'm doing this. You'll see, Kat. It's going to change everything." Mother's eyes are bright this morning and she's excited. For the last few months she hasn't had any energy, sometimes spending all day in her slippers and bathrobe, and leaving half-finished drawings all over the house. She's hardly painted at all. Daddy has started saying again that nothing suits her, that nothing is right with her. Maybe if she starts an antique business, it will change everything and she can be happier. After all, Daddy said he'd never been happier than when he told Mr. Price he was quitting to start his own company.
"How long are we going to be gone?" I ask.
"As long as it takes." She clicks the locks on my suitcase and looks at me. Her face breaks into a grin. "Yeah, as long as it takes," she says. "To get a new start." I wish she would tell me exactly how long we'll be gone, but when we take a vacation Daddy always figures out when we'll leave and when we'll arrive. Mother's not much for that kind of detail. She tosses me my tennis shoes. "Come on, we need to eat some breakfast."
In the kitchen, Mother opens up the Allstate road atlas in front of me on the table. "Up the East Coast, sugar, heading to Maine. Why don't you look and see what you think is an eight- or ten-hour drive for today. We have to go pick up the trailer in Cartersville first." She pauses. "Remember, we want to find good bargains on antiques, so make sure we go through some small towns."
It's easy to read a road map. Daddy taught me. Just add the little red numbers together to find the distance and then figure maybe fifty miles per hour and come up with the time. I begin with the dot for our town, Marietta, Georgia, and write down the numbers on a pad Mother keeps for phone messages. I pick a highway heading northeast from Cartersville and follow it to places that might be around eight hours away, which is all Daddy says you ought to drive in a day. After I calculate on the pad, it turns out Greensboro, North Carolina, is the right distance. Mother keeps walking through the kitchen, taking boxes and bags to the carport. When she stops to drink the rest of her coffee, I show her Greensboro on the map.
"That's exactly where I thought we should stop," Mother says. "Exactly." She picks up the ballpoint click pen and circles Greensboro. I don't like her marking on the map because it ruins the way the page looks, everything printed neatly, and there in the middle, her off-kilter dark blue ink circle. She stuffs the atlas in her tote bag and takes it to the car before I have a chance to look at the places I might want to visit. We're bound to pass some Civil War battlefields on the way to Maine, but I can't just come out and ask about them, because Mother doesn't like Civil War history. Whenever I go to the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield, only a few miles from where we live, I go with Aunt Laura. She teaches history at the high school, and Daddy says his sister got all the brains in the family.
The summer before third grade when Aunt Laura asked to take me to Kennesaw Mountain for the Civil War Centennial Celebration, Mother argued with her. I overheard her say that a celebration of war was nonsense -- that it was gruesome to pretend men were dying all over again, especially when we're in the middle of a real war. It's about history, Aunt Laura replied; it's important to remember how and why things happened. Mother said she still didn't want me to go, that the segregationists used these spectacles to whip up people's emotions. Finally Aunt Laura said it was better that I learn history from her than from someone who was prejudiced, if you know what I mean, and Mother gave in.
On Kennesaw's rolling green field, inside a split-rail fence that bordered the road, men dressed in dark blue Union uniforms marched with their rifles on their shoulders toward butternut-clad Confederates who were lying in shallow depressions or crouched behind trees at the base of the mountain. On the first ridge, two small cannons were visible. Aunt Laura and I stood outside the visitor center looking down on the field, and the big crowd around us yelled and whooped. "This isn't exactly how the battlefield looked," Aunt Laura told me, "but the Park Service didn't want to ruin the field by digging trenches." It didn't matter to me. To me it was all spectacular -- the noise of the people, the uniformed soldiers with their rifles, and not knowing what was going to happen next.
The lines of Union soldiers stopped and fired ...
