To
summarize a short description of the book on his web site: Tom Mach’s debut
novel Sissy! won the 2003 Kansas Authors Club J. Donald Coffin
Memorial Book Award for the best book published by a member in the previous
two years, and, unlike Civil War novels that focus on generals and battle
strategies, Sissy! looks at that war through the eyes of
slaves who want to fight for freedom and women who exhibited enormous courage
in treating the wounded on the battlefield, and even, in some instances,
disguising themselves as men to fight as soldiers. The novel opens in 1857
with an Underground Railroad rescue of a slave girl. War breaks out, and
in 1862, a Lawrence, Kansas, woman, Jessica Radford, follows a path of
vengeance when she finds her parents murdered and Nellie, an adopted former
slave girl, missing and possibly killed as well. While three of the border
ruffians who did this deed are hung, the leader, Sam Toby, escapes. Obsessed
with abolishing slavery and seeking revenge for these murders, Jessica,
disguised as a male soldier on a Tennessee battleground, is about to kill
the wrong man. But she is challenged when she confronts Sissy, Nellie’s
guardian angel. While Sissy! ends with Quantrill's raid of
Lawrence, it includes battle scenes in Perryville, Hoover’s Gap, Stones
River, and Island Mound—the site where the first black slaves died in the
Civil War while serving under the flag of the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry,
started by James Lane.
The introduction
of the young slave-girl ghost, Sissy--who may give the reader trouble in
an otherwise realistic narrative, but has an important thematic function--and
making the central character a female Civil War soldier, definitely makes
this an unusual Civil War novel. And, in handling plot, Mach keeps
several stories going at once, moving from one to another, usually for
a couple of pages at a time (usually identified chronologically by time
and place), which does sometimes get a little confusing, but he often holds
reader interest by use of the sometimes effective technique of ending a
segment with a dramatic moment provoking curiosity about what happens next
in that story line. When the curiosity is satisfied in a few pages,
that usually works pretty well, but in a few cases it reminded me of the
technique from the Saturday movie serials of my boyhood, which would break
away with a cliff hanger which was much less dramatic opening the next
week's segment. An extreme (but not the only) example is when a young
black woman, Nellie, climbs into bed with a sleeping Roger Toby, the "good
twin brother" of Sam, the villain she thinks it is, just before Roger's
wife, Sara, comes into the room, is shocked, and leaves, "slamming the
door behind her"--end of Chapter 6. The next chapter opens with another
story in another place, and we only get back to this one after two intervening
chapters, almost 30 pages, with pieces from half a dozen other stories,
in half a dozen other places in between, to then learn that Roger has simply
told Sara the truth and she believes him--so completely that she leaves
him alone in the house with Nellie, asking him to provide the girl with
a towel as she comes naked from the bath. This may help to characterize
the little known Roger as an exceptionally virtuous man before his big
mistaken identity scene with Jessica, but the motivation of all three women
involved (including Sissy) strains credibility. Generally speaking, however,
Mach is true enough to history (in fictionalizing the Quantrill raid in
the last 50 pages, for example) to hold a reader's attention, and provoke
us to think about these things again--and for me to recommend the novel.
For additional information on the author and his novel,
including ordering information, see www.sissynovel.com,
or write to:
Hill Song Press
P. O. Box 486
Lawrence, KS 66044
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