In Lidie Newton, Jane Smiley, has created an extraordinary female protagonist, she's a genuinely Great American Character, like Huck Finn or Isobel Archer or Rabbit Angstrom. Smiley takes us to the faultline in the middle of America in the middle of the last century, and shows us how so much of its successes and failures since then were born in those tense, terrifying times- South vs North; Confederacy vs Union; pro-slavers vs abolitionists; puritans vs hedonists; and women vs men -- all the great American conflicts are here; all the great fissures that erupted into the worst war the world had then ever seen, the American Civil War.

American Civil War, Slavery, Puritans, Hedonists