What surprising details did you learn about this chapter in history? What family stories of war and survival have been passed down to you? How do those lives and stories compare with the ones portrayed in the novel? In what ways can fiction sometimes reveal the truth more fully than nonfiction?
I learned more about John Brown, in particular. Before reading the book I had heard the old song, of course, and knew of the incident & his fate, but Bohjalian provided more context.
I shared in response to the previous question about my mother telling us a lot about her experiences during World War II. She returned to her family’s farm in South Dakota to await my father’s – safe, thankfully – return. He was drafted in March 1942, one year after they married. But he NEVER spoke of it. If the subject came up, he literally left the room. So I will never know what he experienced. My mother’s stories were of surviving the Great Depression, during which my grandparents barely held on to the farm, and her stress & worry while my father was serving in the Pacific Theater. Sometimes she didn’t receive letters for weeks and then would suddenly receive a whole stack, so she would put them in date order to read them. But I didn’t hear actual stories about the horrors of war. Those aspects I learned about in history classes in high school and college, of course. But I have always learned a great deal from reading historical fiction, especially stories of individual bravery, courage, and sacrifice.
My family history of war goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War. I have relatives who fought in every war since then except for the Korean War. My grandfather, a WW1 veteran talked at great length about his experiences as well as my father who was a WW2 veteran. Only those family members of the Vietnam War were not willing to share. I live in MO, which was a border state during the Civil War. Families were divided. None of my family owned slaves; however, brothers from our same family fought on opposing sides. Our family farm was torched by Union troops and yet part of the family fought with them. The cemetery where I live has a Union soldier area and a Confederate soldier area. To this day, my community is in an uproar over that. I could definitely relate to this book in my ways, especially Jonathan’s role as a soldier and Libby’s character in feeling that “no man should be left to die.”
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