What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Lynn Austin

Candle in the Darkness by Lynn Austin was the first book I read as a free post-college graduate. Studying English is an incredible experience, but it equates to giving up your freedom to choose what you read. Unless, of course, you’re like me and you somehow find time to read extra books on top of the books your professors assign to you. Books are like drugs. Or like potato chips, anyway.

What did I do with my new-found freedom? My parents gave me an iPad as a graduation gift, so I got onto Amazon and looked at the free Kindle books it offers. I may have also looked up a list of good Kindle books, but I can't remember whether this was on it. Either way, I downloaded a few classics, as well as this book. I've been warned that free Kindle books can be terrible. That's why I was going for the classics, where there aren't any copyright issues. For some reason, I decided to take a chance on this book. It probably had to do with the fact that it had good reviews; however, I was not expecting much.

Ms. Austin, if you're somehow reading this, I want to let you know that I enjoyed your book. I really did. It's well done, which I'll get to in a minute. The problem with it is that your prologue is stupid. It made me wonder if this book was going to prove everyone right, that free Kindle books aren't good. The moment your prologue was over, however, I realized this wasn't a book I wanted to delete from my iPad. I was also highlighting portions. But if you are ever thinking about writing a similar prologue again, don't. It was a mistake. Compared with the rest of the book, it was poorly written and melodramatic.

From now on, I'm going to ignore said prologue in this review.

For me, good historical fiction is not a history lesson. The Poisonwood Bible made this mistake. On the other side of the coin, good historical fiction is not just a story placed in another time period. If someone were to write Tom Sawyer now, I would consider it an adventure story, not historical fiction. Historical fiction should blend these two elements seamlessly; it ought to give me an insider's perspective on historical events while playing out an original story. I want to leave the book wondering why in heaven's name the main character lost the election, for instance. Obviously, they could not have won the election because history says someone else did, but I want this character to be such a plausible and believable part of the historic setting and timeline that I could almost mistake them for an actual person. Austin found this balance in her book, which is the number one reason why I would highly recommend it for anyone wishing to read some good historical fiction.

The setting is before and during the American Civil War. The protagonist, a woman who grew up in the South but who visits the North for a while and becomes an abolitionist. There is a romance element to the story without it being a romance, there are religious elements to the story without it being a sermon, and there were historical events discussed without them feeling forced. Part of this last trait was achieved by what felt like honesty from the protagonist: she had a fiance and family members serving in both armies, she lived in the South's capital, and she was relating what she was hearing from letters and from newspapers, as well as what she was seeing while she was out and about. The placement of the character was perfect, making the story feel believable and natural.

Something else I especially loved about this book was those religious elements I mentioned. The protagonist owns a slave who is an ardent Christian, and through him, Austin explains what Christianity must mean for a believing slave. It gave me a different perspective on my own religion, which I appreciate and thank her for. This slave isn't the only Christian voice to weigh in, either; representatives from the white, Southern school of thought and from the white, Northern school of thought are also represented, and I think they are represented as fairly as possible from our obviously biased, hindsight point of view. The presence of this theme in the book deepened my understanding of the Civil War, another reason I would recommend this book to historical fiction lovers.

To give you a taste of this religious element, so you can see what I mean, here are some portions of the book that I highlighted:

“Don’t go running ahead of God. He’s gonna tell you when the time’s right. Then whatever you do gonna make a difference."

"Time you grow up, Missy Caroline. Your heavenly Father needs you to be His servant.” 

"People on both sides better not be praying for their wills to be done, because God don’t answer them kind of prayers."

“God use that war to show you white boys what it’s like to be a slave,” Josiah continued. “For four years, you sleeping on the ground instead of in your fine houses. You eating food that no one would feed a dog. You wearing rags and going barefoot and marching all day beneath a hot sun until you so weary you want to die. You ain’t allowed to see your family or the woman you love. Your life ain’t even your own anymore, with someone telling you what to do and when to get up and when you can go to bed." (slave to a white soldier after the war was over)

 One last thing before I end this post: This is the first book in a series, and the other books are not free (an excellent marketing choice, in my opinion). The first was good enough that I may just buy the next one.