A vivid slice of life from the Civil War South, seen through the eyes of a child who doesn't yet understand the upheaval reshaping his world. Bobbie Tayloe is a young boy on a Virginia plantation, and Bosher captures with delicate precision the way war seeps into the smallest moments of childhood, the absence of fathers, the presence of soldiers, the shifting dynamics among those who remain. At the heart of the story lies Bobbie's bond with Peter Black, the young enslaved man who serves as his companion and protector. Their relationship reveals the complex tenderness that could exist beneath the brutality of slavery, as well as the impossible loyalties that war forces upon everyone, young and old. Bosher writes with the sentimental but often piercing clarity of late Victorian fiction, rendering the antebellum South with neither celebration nor condemnation, but with an eye for the humanity trapped within its contradictions. The novel asks what remains of innocence when the world itself is being torn apart, and what loyalty means when the ground beneath it has shifted forever.
