WHEN THE JESSAMINE GROWS by Donna Everhart

Joetta’s loving family’s hard-working subsistence but satisfying agrarian way of life is threatened by North Carolina’s secession and war clouds. Grandpa fills her boys’ heads full of stories of gallant soldiers as she and husband Ennis are impartial to the conflict and instead focused on the family’s peaceable tending to the land. But oldest son Henry joins the Rebs and Ennis must follow, becoming two representatives of the yeoman farmer class who formed the bulk of the Confederate army, without the slave-holdings or riches of the men who set the rebel nation on the path to rebellion and substantial destruction.

Joetta maintains her neutral principles and soon finds out if you’re not with them, you’re against them. A heavy price must be paid for pacifist convictions when the community’s patriotic fervor ostracizes anyone with divergent views. Joetta’s mindset and her feelings for her family and farm are rendered with incredible depth in the narrative. Tension is keenly built in everyday conversations and interactions particularly as local confederate zealots tease out and react to her contrarian views. The Civil War devastates Joetta and her family, as it surely did scores across the rural south. Her will to survive and yearning for hope is powerful. Multiple times Joetta muses for the way things were before the war and I initially was somewhat put off by the repetition. But taking stock in her deprivations, what else was positive in her life besides memories?

A great read for Civil War fiction fans ready for a change of pace from stories that focus on the military action. This one is all about what was left behind, bringing to mind Cold Mountain, but that classic had an almost haunting undertone that I can’t say that this one captures.