A bit disjointed. Sometimes hard to tell who is narrating. Email this reviewKIRKUS REVIEWA new novel of the Civil War and its aftermath from the author of Cold Mountain (1997, etc.).This novel begins in 1906 in upstate New York, where an elderly woman is staying at an establishment that is part hotel, part hospital. A visitor arrives, and his request for information about his own past takes readers back in time to another world. The visitor is a freed slave named James Blake. The woman is Varina Davis�who, as Jefferson Davis? wife, was once the first lady of the Confederate States of America. As she moves back and forth in her own life story, V recalls scenes from her childhood in Natchez, Mississippi, and her marriage to a widower more than twice her age. After leaving home, she?s never settled for long. Her husband?s election to the Senate means a move to Washington, D.C., and his ascendancy to the leadership of the Confederacy takes her to Richmond. After the war, she takes cheap rooms in London. Varina is certainly a fascinating figure. She is well-educated, her own political sympathies do not align perfectly with those of her husband, and, after being impoverished by the war, she launches a career as a journalist in New York¥writing being one of the only ways for a woman of her station to earn money. Readers who helped to make Frazier?s first novel a huge bestseller may cheer his return to the War Between the States. Whether or not his fourth book will earn the author new fans depends largely on whether or not there?s a fresh audience for his heavily lyrical¥sometimes turgid¥style. While there are moments of dry humor¥Mrs. Davis is nobody?s fool¥this reads more like a novel its heroine might have read in the late days of the 19th century than something written in the 21st. The most contemporary touch is the disjointed timeline, but even that isn?t entirely effective. The resulting text isn?t so much a coherent narrative as a series of vignettes.Intriguing subject. Uneven execution.

Charles Frazier is one of my favorite authors. He focuses on The South and the Civil War. In this book we learn about Varina, the wife of the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Varina really was Jefferson Davis's wife so we're often trying to figure out how much of this story is real and how much is the result of a very talented imagination. The real Varina Davis did rescue a Black from the abusive streets of Richmond and took him into her household to play with her children. She also did take him along with her as she tried to escape the pursuing Yankees and flee to Florida and eventually Havana. That was the plan but they did not make it and were taken in to custody. At that point the young Black was taken from her. All of this did happen. Where it appears that Frazier's imagination intervenes is he imagines that the young man grows up to be a teacher and eventually reunites with her as she is living fifty years later in retirement home in New York. In a series of meetings they explore what he remembers in only bits and pieces. She fills in the details. A fascinating literary twist one can only hope might really have happened.

In the process she validates him and we learn much more about Varina. She was much younger than Jefferson Davis and his second wife. She was offered to Davis by her father who treated her, as was common in the day, more like property than a person. She pushed back on the arrangement but ultimately consented. They spent many years separated and she in her later years even encouraged him to live with another woman. She relished the role of wife of a Senator and as First Lady of the Confederacy with all the entertaining that entailed and the fashionable clothing that went along with the entertaining. The most detailed events we learn about is their fight from Richmond as the Confederacy was falling. She, with her husband, were jailed once they were caught.

It's an intriguing story of an independent woman. While she was the First Lady of the Confederacy she clearly was not a believer of the inherit decay it was based on. It sounds and feels like a real story. It's unclear where the embellishment starts and the actual history is left behind. It's called a novel on its cover yet there definitely was a Varina Davis. A woman I would never have known about without reading this book. ( )

(39) I absolutely loved 'Cold Mountain,' but I can't quite fully endorse any of Frazier's other novels. This one started quite good - it is the story of Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis. Their marriage, the flight from Richmond after the Civil War ended, her later years. It is told through alternating time periods in a series of visits with a black man who was once a son of sorts to Varina, reunited many years later. It is a sad, wistful, at times bitter novel. In this rendering Varina does not feel pity for the Confederacy or her husband and friends. She knows they were all wrong and the guilt lies heavy on her.

I am assuming this is based in truth and if so, Varina was a brilliant woman - married off way too young to a man much older, and frankly an asshole. Notwithstanding the fact that she eventually had a reasonably successful marriage. I wonder what she could have become if she lived in a different time when women have agency. The writing is lovely and full of atmosphere. The timeline is hard to follow, however, and so much in the middle seems to be missing. It was hard for me to feel nostalgia for her possessions and her life as a luminary in DC and then 'First Lady' as there were not many poignant details and stories of this time. Much more so the before and after.

A near miss for me, I really liked much of it, but I was definitely ready for it to end The ending was rather weak and dispirited and overall left me with a 'just OK' vibe. The magic of 'Cold Mountain,' may never be rediscovered - I am sure Frazier is sick of that sentiment. ( )

If he is the boy in the blue book, where to start? He can't expect to recognize her after four decades, and he certainly doesn't expect her to recognize him. The last they saw each other he would have been no more than six. Firm memory of childhood eludes him until about eight years old, and before that it's mostly whispers of sound and images flashing like photographs. A dead boy lying on the ground, a grand house, a tall woman with black hair and a soothing voice.

The title character of this novel observes in 1865, “Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’s all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt.”

Varina Howell Davis knows whereof she speaks. Not only has she seen her native South provoke a catastrophic civil war, her husband has led the charge as president of the Confederacy. Even when the cause rides high, she can’t go anywhere without hearing vicious gossip about herself and Jeff, which becomes ever more strident as defeat looms.

Personal tragedy dogs her as well; most of their children die very young, leaving her perpetually in mourning, and her marriage has been a disaster from the first. As the barely eighteen-year-old bride to a much older, widower husband, Varina doesn't reckon on his cold stubbornness, his political ambitions, habit of breaking promises, financial chicanery, or abiding obsession with his late wife.

Not all of this is Varina’s naïveté, however. Her father, having lost his fortune to speculation, tosses her into the hands of a relative who browbeats the women who make up his household. Consequently, Jeff Davis offers freedom, she thinks, an irony that underlies the entire narrative.

All this turmoil might provide drama enough for three novels, but the astonishing thing about Varina is that it fails to add up even to one. Frazier has grounded his tale in 1906, when Varina is living in Saratoga, New York, at a hotel-cum-therapy establishment, and a figure from her distant past drops in.

This is James Blake, whom Varina adopted off a Richmond street during the war, and who has tracked her down to try to piece together the fragments of his early life. His Sunday visits prompt her recollections, which spin the narrative of her life as well.

I dislike this way of telling stories, which seems unnatural and forced—“let me now recount my life"—yet there’s something here that commands attention. James is black, though light-skinned, whereas Varina is dark-complected, which has opened her to ridicule and prejudice throughout her life in the South. James is therefore the prime mover and Varina’s conscience on racial attitudes, a brilliant thematic setup.

Unfortunately, it falls flat. The retrospective narrative jumps around incessantly, as you would expect an oral memoir to do, and the myriad episodes don’t hang together. Frazier creates several marvelous vignettes, introducing, among others, Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor, Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Varina’s good friend and famous diarist, the warm, ebullient Mary Chesnut.

But there’s no plot to speak of; no urgent question to answer; no secrets to unravel; and therefore no climax. Sometimes there’s tension, but more often not, for the vignettes, though sometimes interesting, seldom engage you emotionally. Frazier relies on Varina’s moral pronouncements and his ability to set a scene, both of which he expresses in imagery that, at its best, leaps off the page.

But does that equal a novel, or at least, a good novel? I say no, especially because Varina is the only character of any depth. She’s a terrific tragic figure, possessing remarkable strength and heartfelt eloquence (if, at odd moments, she sounds like a psychotherapist). But James remains a vague character, part stage prompter, part Greek chorus.

You see Jeff’s flaws out loud, but the rest of him remains abstract; and if there was ever a complicated leader, it was Jefferson Davis — who, in reality, sought a battlefield command rather than political leadership. Frazier notes that he enjoys combat — Davis attended West Point, after all — but doesn’t show why.

Frazier’s historical perspective mystifies me too. He re-creates the Confederacy’s collapse with verve and frightening detail, but the tone and certain aspects of the story rest on a pretense or a misconception, whichever you prefer to call it. The way Frazier tells it, why, practically nobody in the Confederacy except a few hardheads like Jeff thought that warring against the North was a good idea, which they somehow managed to sell to a credulous populace.

What nonsense. Frazier himself makes clear that the South kept fighting, despite taking terrible punishment, and there were many men who did not desert. Moreover, to suggest that a few misguided souls brought on the Civil War idealizes the Confederacy as a place where fire-eating secession was an anomaly, while also selling short the people who suffered for it.

It’s as if nobody back then had any convictions of their own, so were easily manipulated. I can’t stand that implication, which invites us to look down on nineteenth-century Americans as less intelligent than we, less capable of moral reasoning. Hindsight comes in handy, doesn’t it? ( )