Long Shadows
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Tom Smiley is a Confederate soldier whose regret for ill-chosen allegiance haunts him not just from enlistment through the horrors of a Union prison but all the way into the afterlife, where he lingers in his ancestral home, unable to shed his shame over fighting to protect slavery--until, one summer afternoon in the early 2000s, two intruders barge into his Virginia house and force him to confront his past.
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I've read more than enough Civil War fiction and nonfiction, but at least this story–set very near where I live in Augusta County VA–was engaging. Told from the point of view of a ghost who is disturbed by the arrival of a couple who plan to modernize the house he's lived since he was a living child, I would have welcomed more interaction between him and the couple. Instead, we get lots of flashbacks of his experiences in the war as a soldier and a prisoner–flashbacks that are beautifully written.
The book does make the point of the immorality of slavery and the Confederate fight to preserve it, but maybe goes overboard on the atrocities of the Union soldiers toward their prisoners. More balance would have been welcome.
