I have to admit that I’m not usually a fan of historical fiction that takes place in time of war.  Battle scenes and descriptions of armory bore me, but I decided to give Luke Jackson’s book, The Wrong Choice, a read mainly because I’ve been researching the Civil War a lot lately for a project of my own.  I thought reading something else from that genre might help or inspire me.

The Wrong Choice centers around Jean-Pierre, a French Canadian student, who has agreed to spy for the Confederacy believing the Confederates will help free Quebéc from its English oppressors if the Confederate army wins the war. Posing as a reporter, Jean-Pierre witnesses a first hand account of what its like to be a Civil War Soldier.  Distraught by the everyday scene of death and destruction, he begins to question if he’s made the right choice or not.

This book is basically his reporting and presents a nice point of view from an outsider. Jean-Pierre becomes caught up in several small story lines which cause him to stray from his main goal, including a love interest in a Kentucky girl who he meets after following a Confederate deserter in the hills. Civil War buffs will enjoy following Jean-Pierre on his journey because Jackson has penned several historical locales into his book. From the Battle of Bull Run to Shiloh, to a raft trip down the Mississippi echoing the tales of Twain and then a trip through New Orleans on a steamboat, setting plays a huge part in this book as the war plays out. I was impressed with the lead character and not bored by his travels or descriptions of the war taking place before him, and felt the “coming of age” tone to Jean was well written.

However, that cannot be said for the physical book itself. It could use a complete overhaul as far as editing and formatting goes.  The front cover is a drab brown color and contains a grainy black and white picture of a solider camp. The blurb on the back cover is fuzzy and contains a red wavy line under one of the words from where Microsoft Word thought the word was misspelled.  There’s also a blue cursor that’s been captured in the text from where the blurb was probably copied and pasted as a picture. The first page of the book serves as a title page and copyright page, and also contains the word count.  There are no page numbers throughout the entire book.  And the right margin has not been justified.

Also, there are black and white images throughout the book which add a nice touch when they were used to introduce chapters and were high resolution.  There is a picture of barges on the river and of an old depot that I found to be mesmerizing and really set the tone for that part of the story.  However, there are also stock photos, probably from Word, such as cartoon images of arrows, music notes, and letters scattered in the text which feel like anomalies, serve no important purpose in the story, and only distract the reader.

Overall, I think The Wrong Choice is a good read, and just suffers from too many wrong choices as far as formatting and design goes.  With an extreme rework, new cover art, and good manuscript formatting, this book could have quite a “historical” impact.

Copyright © 2008
Lulu.com
$17.50 Paperback
132 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4116-4226-3

As I Rode with Cullen Baker opens, we are met with a scene evocative of Gone with the Wind with Tara burning in the background. Set in the South in the midst of the civil war, fifteen year old Jessica Linville watched while the Federal cavalry burned her house to the ground. When I was younger, I used to love a story set in the south during civil war times with a feisty female character at its center, so this book drew my interest immediately. Let me clear one thing up right away, despite my reference to Gone with the Wind, the character of Jessica Linville is nothing like the character of Scarlett O’Hara. Jessica is a proper young lady with manners, a sense of propriety, and has a genuine caring attitude toward her fellow man. And Scarlett had none of those qualities. However, the character of Jessica is a strong one, and she has a strong voice which carries the action of the book as seen through her eyes.

In order to escape the renegades who are taking the very last that Jessica had, Joshua, who has worked for the family Jessica’s entire life, hacks off her hair, dresses her in slave clothes, and they run off through the night. Jessica lost her mother six years previously to fever, and her father recently in battle, so she lived with the family servants, all of whom, except for Joshua, ran when the soldiers arrived. Joshua didn’t want to let down the memory of her father by running out on her, but did his best to try and get her to safety.

   With bluecoats in the wide drive, he’d forced me into the darkness, saying, “We can’t stay, Miss Jessica. These renegades would harm you.”
   Now, silhouettes of a dozen riders trampled the lawns, cheering as my home burned. I threw myself prone in the dirt in despair, and felt the thudding hooves beat like devils’ hearts in my chest.
   Joshua seemed gone a long time before I saw him returning through the neglected cane rows. Sporadic shouts broke through the diminishing roar of flames, and I prayed that none of those men would notice the hunched figure dodging flickering bands of firelight.
   He knelt beside me, gasping, “Here’s the shirt you got to put on.” Disentangling part of a bundle, he didn’t wait for my approval but began tearing at stubborn dress hooks, uncovering me to the chill air.
   He slid the correct arm into place as if I were an infant. “Step outen them clothes, shimmy an’ all. No— don’t stand up—”
   Pushing at the pale green dress material, then the white linen, I stripped to the skin and shoved first one foot, then the other, into the legs of a slave boy’s britches. They were limp with being worn, and though I was small for fifteen, tight through the hips. Joshua set a hat, rank with sweat, on my disgraced head, and I realized he was disguising me as a boy.

Unfortunately, the color of Joshua’s skin turned out to be a problem in the town where he attempted to send a wire to someone to come and pick up the boy, Jess. In one of the senseless acts that abounded during that time period, a mob of men attempted to lynch Joshua, but then shot him as Jess was trying to remove the rope from around his neck. Before the mob could turn on her, Cullen Baker rode up on his horse, scooped her up, and rode out of town. Thus began Jess’s adventure with the notorious outlaw, Cullen Baker.

Although Cully knew from the very start Jess was not a boy, he does not blow her cover, and goes to some lengths to help preserve it because he takes her to the camp of the Independent Rangers, who specialized in pursuing and capturing men who deserted the Confederate Army, but which more often than not took advantage of the fact that most of the men in the Arkansas and Texas areas were away at war, leaving mostly elderly men, women and children. This left the door open for acts of intimidation, rape, theft and violence for groups of well armed men like the Independent Rangers. Jessica’s feelings toward Cully are ambivalent. She can’t seem to reconcile the fact that he would save and protect her from a mob, but also steals. But then Cully gives the money away.

   The next place we stopped was a frame shack that a big wind would blow into Cass County. The rusted tin roof must have leaked considerably, and the cracks where chinking had fallen out were wide enough for a ferret to crawl through. A dirty-faced boy about ten answered the knock. He looked cold, in a thin shirt, trousers which struck his shins two inches above his ankles, and barefoot. Saving his shoes—if he had shoes— for winter, no doubt. More of the money passed to him. He beamed at Cully and threw a cheerful wave to me. I waved back.
   “Consumption,” Cully explained, settling himself in the stirrups. “Won’t last till Christmas.”
   I was sorry for the boy, especially because he had to live his short life in such poverty. At least, before the war ruined things, I’d known comfort and plenty and the love of respectable people. “Cully.”
   “What?”
   “Which do you think is worse—to have nice things and lose them, or never to have them in the first place?”
   “You tell me,” he said shortly, and then we came to a settlement of three houses together, none looking like it could withstand a hard rain. He parted with more currency at all of them.
   When we were on our way again, I couldn’t help asking, “What will we do for money?”
   “There’s ways of getting more.”
   “Stealing it!”
   “How the hell else would I get it? You see anybody around here going to give me a job and pay me a wage?”

I Rode with Cullen Baker is a fast paced read, somewhat short in length as is necessary for the target age group. While some of the story line is somewhat predictable, RLB Hartmann spins an engaging tale and keeps the reader turning the pages to find out what happens next. Hartmann uses the historical figure Cullen Baker, and weaves a story set during a time when his whereabouts were unknown, making the story potentially feasible. The Cully in the story is a much more romanticized version of the historical figure than you will find in the Wikipedia information about Cullen Baker. However, it was fun to suspend my disbelief and take a journey back to the south of the civil war times and take a ride with a wild desperado with a not often seen softer side. I think Hartmann’s target audience will love the adventure.

Preview I Rode With Cullen Baker