I adored this book since I read it when I was getting into genealogy and was learning about my ancestors who settled coastall carolina/Georgia back in the day. ( )

53281

The quartet gets off to a good start with this first book. It didn't take me long to get all caught up in the story of Mark Browning, Robert and Eliza Mackay, Caroline Cameron, and all the secondary characters that held my attention as much as the main ones.

Eugenia Price often combined truth with fiction in her novels, using actual people and telling their true story, while embellishing a bit here and there, but still sticking to facts. Then, she'd add fictional characters into the midst, her skill as an author keeping it from feeling phony or uneven, until it seems as though they really were a part of Savannah history, too.

That's how I felt about Mark Browning, since his story was told without a lot of drama and contrived situations, nothing that couldn't have happened to an actual person. You could actually find yourself doing an online search for a biography, before remembering there won't be one.

As with many historical novels, there's romance involved, but again, it's not overdone. Mark finds the road to true love, but not before his misguided heart takes him in the wrong direction. There's drama, but without the melodrama.

I won't say anything to give away the story, but I just want to warn that, where the characters are actual people, fiction mirrors fact, so if they suffered a tragic fate in real life, the same will happen in the book. You wouldn't read a novel about Lincoln and expect a different outcome at Ford's Theatre; the same goes for any of Ms. Price's novels that involve real people.

You'll get some knowledge of Savannah history, so you don't have to feel you're just killing time by reading this; well worth the time. ( )

I adored this book since I read it when I was getting into genealogy and was learning about my ancestors who settled coastall carolina/Georgia back in the day. ( )

long epic novel about a young man's early years in Savannah in the early 1800's ( )