STAND AND FACE THE MORNING

Book excerpt: Stand and Face the Morning tells a robust, romantic story of the Musick and Lewis families of Colonial Virginia, who followed the migration down the Great Wagon Road into the backcountry of the Carolinas. The narrative follows them through the trials of hewing homesteads from the wilderness, wrestling with the choices of allegiance at the onset of the Revolutionary War, and struggling for survival as they are caught up in the bitter civil war which engulfs their homeland. The central figures are the patriarch Abram Musick and his wife Sarah, whose abiding love undergirds the family. Tormented eldest son Lewis carries within himself the wrongs and hurts he encounters. He joins brothers, cousins, and neighbors in the Patriot cause in his unholy quest for vengeance. Strong women characters walk beside their men and, through artistry and grace, produce families worthy of a new nation: Sarah’s daughters Terrell and Sally, neighbor Saro Tweddy whose husband travels with Daniel Boone into Kentucky, and Annie McKinney whose eyes look ever toward the western lands. In the end, the families remain strong and loyal to one another. “We are bound by ties of blood and by a love which will ne’er die. Together as family we sh’ll face with hope whate’er the morrow brings.” Reviews Adventure and romance, joy and loss fill these pages as Owens’ lively story carries us along the rough trails of these wilderness roads. Sit and enjoy. - Jim Minick, author of Finding a Clear Path, Burning Heaven, and Her Secret Song. The American Revolution tears apart a frontier community in this gripping historical novel. When Abram and Sarah Musick lead their clan—seven children with assorted servants, nephews and inlaws in tow—to White Oak Mountain on the western margins of North Carolina, they think they’ve found paradise. In this region of virgin timber and rich bottomland, nature showers its bounty on them even when it almost kills them. (“Well, I daresay the good thing is we sh’ll have a haunch of bear with our huckleberry dumplings tomorrow.” [sic]) Alas, the escalating quarrel between Britain and the colonies disrupts their bliss— in their corner of the South, the revolution becomes a savage civil war pitting Patriots against Tories, Indians against whites, coastal planters and merchants against backwoods farmers and neighbor against neighbor. Abram wants to sit out the storm, but his sons, led by the brooding, impetuous Lewis, rally to the Patriot cause. Life doesn’t stop just because there’s a war on—farmers have to fit in stints of militia service around the cycle of planting and harvesting—but it grows increasingly desperate as Patriot settlers face raids by loyalist irregulars and their Cherokee allies. After his sweetheart is murdered by Tory marauders, Lewis leads his guerrilla band on a brutal campaign of vengeance as Sarah agonizes over the hardening of her son’s heart. The author’s limpid prose, steeped in the pious, musical language of the era, brings this absorbing narrative to life with well-observed period detail that encompasses everything from log-cabin building techniques to Sarah’s herbal medicine. (Slippery-elm bark and fried onions, it seems, are great for gunshot wounds.) Owens brings readers the grit and trauma of the battlefield, but also the quieter rhythms of farming and trading, cooking and childcare—and hoping anxiously for loved ones to return from peril. The result is an indelible portrait of a family struggling to hold together as the world turns upside down. A richly textured tale that registers epic events on the most intimate scale. Kirkus Discoveries, Nielsen Business Media, 770 Broadway, New York, NY 10003