UNDER THE MAN-FIG

Nearly forgotten today, Molly Evelyn Moore Davis was a popular poet and fiction writer in the late nineteenth-century American South. She published this quirky episodic romance in 1895. Set in a small Texas coastal town during the Civil War, the conventional and contrived plot is decked out with humor, local color, and period detail, which render the novel interesting and enjoyable for moderns. Sally Darling sounds like a well-bred Southern matron. Her delicacy adds charm to the rich menu of characterization and incident. She makes the fictional town of Thornham a kind of Lake Wobegon of times past. Y.R. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB/ MAR 06]