Somerset

Several years ago, I carted Leila Meicham's Roses to Brazil with me. Hard-backed. It was a foolish thing to do for two reasons: 1) At 600+ pages, the tome probably weighed five pounds. 2) I could barely put it down long enough to work. I spent every free minute reading furiously (and if I'm completely honest, crying), hardly even noticing the scenery. So I was just a teensy bit excited to score an advance copy of Somerset over the summer.

Somerset is the prequel to Roses and tells the meandering story of the preceding generations of Warwicks, Tolivers, and DuMonts as they make their way from the antebellum south to the untamed lands of Texas. The star of the story is Jessica Wyndham, a girl-woman of, some might say, misplaced passions who is at the heart of everything that follows. All of Meicham's characters, though, inhabit the pages so fully that one wants to reach into the pages and shake them - or hug them, as the case may be. There are lessons here, as well, in the prices to be paid, both personal and societal, to settle untamed lands...or to resettle them for the white man, at least.

If I cannot claim to have liked Somerset quite as much as Roses, that is merely a testament to the captivating story that books tells, rather than a knock on Somerset. The prequel feels less dramatic, (and therefore less heart-wrenching), perhaps because the reader already has a sense of what comes next - and that something does, in fact come next. In this way, it shares much in common with Rhett Butler's People (the fact that Margaret Mitchell was long in her grave before this prequel was written, aside), another antebellum-postbellum rendering of the South.