Beauty from Ashes

The conclusion to Price's Georgia Trilogy (Bright Captivity; Where Shadows Go) will please her fans but will probably underwhelm those new to her work. As the story reopens in 1845, Anne Couper Fraser is living with her four children at Lawrence, their beloved home on St. Simons Island. Still mourning her late husband, Anne finds comfort only in an unlikely friendship with Eve, a family slave. When her precarious finances force her to give up Lawrence, she is brokenhearted. Though she moves with her children into her brother's household, she never abandons hope that she will again have a home of her own. Finally, she manages to buy a house in Marietta, a small town outside Atlanta. These are years of great change for Anne and her family. On a visit to Florida, her tomboy daughter, Rebecca, now in her 30s, meets a young doctor who follows her back to Marietta. And Anne finds that not all her children share her strong abolitionist views--daughters Fanny and Selina fall in love with men favoring secession, while her son and her grandson join the Confederate Army when the Civil War breaks out. Anne nobly weathers the many tragedies that war brings (even the occupation of her home by Sherman's troops), but her gentility as a sheltered flower of the Old South may leave many longing for a bit of Scarlett O'Hara's fire. Literary Guild, Doubleday Bookclub, Crossings selection. (May)