This Side of Glory is the third of Gwen Bristow's Plantation trilogy. The descendants of the Upjohns, the Larnes and the Sheramys are well entrenched in South Louisiana now, having come through the travails of bush clearing, nation building, Civil War, and Reconstruction and passed gently into the twentieth century. Family history hangs as heavily as the Spanish moss, however, and so when Eleanor Upjohn and Kester Larne announce their engagement, all is not well. Together, and in the face of frequent opposition, they must find a way to navigate the changing world around them and build upon what their ancestors have begun.
There is nothing subtle about Bristow's characters in This Side of Glory. If I felt the characters in the second book, The Handsome Road, to be slightly caricaturized (I did! I did!), there's nothing slight about it now. Kester is the complete and utter personification of a debt-ridden Son of the South, languid and lazy, witty and wily. Eleanor is his opposite, a driven, dynamic woman whose mantra is progress, progress, progress, and whose life is ordered and orderly as Kester's is spontaneous. They are destined to clash, which of course they do.
The entire trilogy is well-written and I did enjoy it. Unfortunately, though, the first book (Deep Summer) was the strongest, with the others not quite able to fill the very large shoes Bristow created.
Three stars.
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