The Handsome Road is the second book in Gwen Bristow's Plantation trilogy. The first book, Deep Summer, saw the arrival of the Larnes, Sheramys, St. Clairs, and countless other families to the rich and unsettled lands along the Mississippi; in The Handsome Road such families are long-since established and ensconced in fine plantation homes.
The two protagonists of this novel are Corrie May Upjohn and Ann Sheramy Larne, distantly related, but light years apart in circumstance and outlook. The Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction tries the strength of both women, who realize their lives are both more and less predictable than they could have guessed before the war.
Bristow has a classic historical fiction writing style and her books are well-written page-turners. That said, I found the characters in The Handsome Road to be slightly caricaturized: Ann Larne is a little too Scarlet O'Hara and Mr. Gilday is a political cartoonist's dream of the perfect carpetbagger. At times these characterizations detract from the overall narrative, but in the whole The Handsome Road is still a very good book. I've already begun the last of the trilogy, This Side of Glory.
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