Library Journal
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As the author explains in her prolog, this novel is based on the written accounts of her great-grandparents' lives. In his 20s and without prospects, Frank Dawson changes his name and signs on to a Confederate ship docked in England as a way to immigrate to the States. When the navy collapses, he fights with the Rebel Army; after the war, Dawson makes his way to Charleston, SC, where he becomes owner and editor of the Charleston News and Courier and a pillar of the community. He eventually marries Sarah Morgan, the daughter of a prominent Baton Rouge family whose fortune was lost in the war. Dawson and the paper prosper until his more liberal editorials start to conflict with rising Jim Crow sentiment. The novel moves away from the directly political when the Dawson family is undone by a servant's scandal. VERDICT NBCC finalist Robinson (Sparta) paints her characters as nuanced products of their time and avoids unrealistic heroics. A scattering of 19th-century newspaper articles, family letters, and data provides context and veracity for this work of fiction but also connects the Reconstruction era's racism, voter suppression, and violent gun culture to present-day societal divides. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/26/18.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A newspaper editor is at odds with both his city and his next-door neighbor in early Jim Crow-era South Carolina.Robinson (Sparta, 2013, etc.) mines the story of her great-grandparents for this bracing historical novel, using actual diary entries, letters, and newspaper articles. But though the story is set mainly in the 1880s, its themes are up-to-the-minute; Robinson uses lynchings, duels, and sexual assaults to shed light on populism and toxic masculinity. Frank Dawson is the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, which has agitated against the region's racist violence since Reconstruction. (A well-turned scene depicts a bloody standoff between black soldiers and resentful whites in 1876 that led to a massacre.) Frank's anti-lynching stance loses him readers to a rival paper. He's facing troubles on the homefront as well. Frank's wife, Sarah, a child of the New Orleans gentry that's fallen victim to poverty and the Civil War, is losing her grip on her young maid and governess, Hlne, who's pursuing a disastrous relationship with the corrupt doctor next door, Thomas McDow, a man scheming to have his wife and father-in-law killed. Such plotlines could easily regress into a lurid, exploitative tale (and, perhaps inevitably, McDow never quite shakes a Snidely Whiplash demeanor), but Robinson handles the material judiciously, using the Dawsons' lives as points in a larger map of civic dysfunction. (She integrates contemporary news stories of murders between chapters to evoke a wider atmosphere of unease.) Robinson suggests that bigotry has trickle-down effects in terms of race, gender, and everyday conduct. All this converges in a climax that's surprising but, given Robinson's careful integration of history and imagination, feels inevitable.A stylish and contemplative historical novel, considerate of facts but not burdened by them. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Robinson (Sparta) bases her formidable novel on the lives of her great-grandparents, exposing the fragile and horrific state of affairs in the American South two decades after the end of the Civil War. Frank Dawson is a principled English Catholic who fought for the Confederacy. But he is committed to promoting equal rights, rule of law, and pacifism in the pages of his newspaper, the Charleston News and Courier, and struggles against the simmering rage and continued violence of many white South Carolinians. He's losing subscribers and facing financial uncertainty. His bright, like-minded wife, Sarah, whose own slave-owning family was ruined by the war, forges on with their respectable-if high-minded-ways at home, employing white servants and speaking French at the dinner table. But when Hélène, a young Swiss woman hired to care for the Dawson children, becomes enamored with an unscrupulous doctor, resentment flairs and events spiral out of Dawson's control. The interspersed family letters and newspaper articles, while intriguing, seem spliced rather than woven into a narrative that leaps by years before settling on one fateful day in March 1889. But Robinson's descriptive and imaginative prose sings; this book is a startling reminder of the immoral and lasting brutality visited on the South by the institution of slavery. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Robinson's (Sparta, 2013) documentary novel intermingles fiction and family memoirs, period editorials, letters, and journal entries in its penetrating rendition of key moments during the lives of her great-grandparents, Frank and Sarah Morgan Dawson. Their characterizations and strong principles are clearly etched throughout; both were outliers in their time yet inextricably defined by it. English-born and a defender of the rule of law, Dawson is moved to join the Confederate Navy; he later rises to become a prominent Charleston newspaper editor, whose progressive writings championing African Americans' rights and civic participation make him unpopular. Raised in a Louisiana family brought low through loss, Sarah is a talented writer all-too-aware of women's social inferiority. The novel's suspenseful second half details a disturbing incident involving the Dawsons' neighbor and governess. While the patchwork approach means the narrative isn't exactly smooth, it proves unyielding and compelling in its timely themes, with many depictions of how white men's seething resentment erupts into racist violence and how Southern codes of honor and toxic values, particularly slavery, corroded individual lives and the national character.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist