Take all the novels you’ve ever read about America’s Civil War, put them in your Magic Bullet, push the on button, and you’d have John Jakes’s novel North and South.
The novel contrasts two families whose ancestors came to America in the 1600s.
The Mains were aristocratic French Protestants who settled in South Carolina.
The first Hazard in America was a working-class English teen who had murdered his stepfather. That lad went to work in the Pennsylvania iron industry.
In 1842 Orry Main and Charles Hazard meet as plebes at the Military Academy at West Point. They become life-long friends despite their different temperaments and backgrounds.
Jakes follows the two men and their families up through Lincoln’s election and the South’s secession.
The dust jacket notes say the novel is “filled with memorable characters, many of them captured from the pages of history.”
Actually, all the memorable characters are from history.
Jakes gives his fictional characters labels and then moves them around like paper dolls.
It’s interesting that Congressman Daniel Boone proposed a bill to close the Military Academy, which was regarded contemptuously in both North and South, but historical trivia is insufficient compensation for characters who are stereotypes.
North and South by John Jakes
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st ed. ©1982. 740 p.
1982 bestseller #8. My grade: C
© 2019 Linda G. Aragoni
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