Beneath the Slashings by Michelle Istenhoff is the topic of today’s post, in accordance with her blog tour. I want to thus first state in full disclosure that she gave me a free copy of the book as part of her launch. As you’ll see, that doesn’t mean I’m going to hold back, however!

Plot

The book is about a girl named Grace Nickerson. While it is the third in a trilogy (the first two of which I have not read), the story lines and characters are not connected except the time periods. The first book is the period before the Civil War, the second book is the period during the Civil War, and the third book is the period after the Civil War. In this book, Grace’s Pa got back from the war where he’s been for several years.

Naturally, Grace is excited when she hears her Pa is coming home, but her enthusiasm was not as much when he informed her that he was not taking her and her brother Sam (her mother died when she was young) back home from her Aunt’s but instead to a lumbering camp where she and Sam would help the chef and their father would work as the foreman. While Sam is cool with it and looks at it as an adventure, Grace is more dominated by fear in addition to anger and is so upset she stops talking to her father.

Early life at the camp

Usually very scared, Grace is unsurprisingly upset to hear that the previous foreman died mysteriously and might have been murdered, although everyone else just laughs it off. She becomes quite lonely being the only girl at the camp. She only spoke to the cook and to her brother; while she served the men their food she spoke little to them, and indeed she grew to be very miserable.

Sam tries many things to try to get Grace out of her shell, but Grace doesn’t want to be helped, although she admires him for just being able to put his feelings aside like nothing. Her brother’s advice is simple and also (to this consciousness at least) mostly silly, “I chose to live each day like I knew it was going to end well. I dealt with trouble when it showed up, but not a moment before. I stopped looking for it, Grace, and that’s all fear is, really. It’s just anticipating trouble.” (page 63; PDF version)

Emotional Advice Given

Fear

This is one of the main problems I have with the book. This advice sounds good, but it doesn’t really help get past fear. While it may help get rid of some minor fear, it’s not going to be effective for getting rid of fear anywhere near the magnitude that someone like Grace is experiencing (her father dying in the war, her father being murdered, etc.), especially after the death of her mother. While this is a helpful technique in everyday life, it ultimately cannot really spur on anywhere close to the transformation Grace had.

“…but Grace pushed these new fears away willfully…” page 133. This is very dangerous advice, and the practice of it can lead to problems later on. Anyone who has had fear (including myself and I would guess including the author) would know that it cannot be just swept aside. It is possible to repress it for later, but as the great psychoanalysts demonstrated, that is actually a step backwards (although it can be useful as a defense mechanism in some situations). I’m not saying I have anything wrong with the advice, but it’s more of one in a toolbox than the great savior to most of psychology. My parents are both psychologists, by the way I know of a guy who didn’t see his mother for five years. He just pushed it away and said it didn’t bother him. But in psychotherapy later he saw boy had it bothered him. Fear of your father dying in a war is not something that you could push aside and say, “Oh well, I’m just going to live this day assuming it won’t happen.” That can be helpful to manage the fear, though.

Anger

While getting help from Sam for her fear, she gets help from an Indian woman named Loon for her anger (mostly at Pa for taking her to the lumber camp). Loon lives all alone and her family and village has been destroyed. Grace is astonished that she does not seem that angry.

“But aren’t you angry?”

“Many emotions live in my heart. Anger would drive others away.”

“But you’re losing your home,” Grace protested, feeling a sudden kinship with the woman.

Loon smiled then. “More reason to turn out anger. I remain Loon, wherever I sleep. Come, we eat. Then I walk you home.” (Page 99; PDF)

Grace looked at the woman with a mixture of pity and amazement. Her culture was dying right before her eyes, like rabbit skins hung on frames with no spirit left in them. “How can you not be angry about all of this?” she asked. “How can you stay so calm?”

“Would anger help me?”

“I suppose not.”

“Would it change anything?”

Grace shook her head.

“It would not,” Loon agreed. “But sadness, this is an emotion I feel much of.”

Grace gave the skin in her hands a sharp tug. The old woman made her feel more than a little ashamed for holding onto her own bitterness so tightly.” (Pages 129 and 130)

Again, as anyone who has really been angry knows; this advice sounds good, but it doesn’t actually help really get rid of anger. You can say anger is harmful and doesn’t make sense all day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be free from it at all. When something comes up, you typically still have the same old grudge. It’s obvious that anger is negative and should be let go of. Realizing this alone does not usually release the anger.

Grace Develops

Grace interacted more socially with some of the men and becomes a regular person in their groups. When her father forbids her going to a dance, she runs away and almost dies. That is when she meets Loon.

Most of her fear has gone away and her anger too. At the same time, a conspiracy is developing in the camp. Several times suspicious things occur and it looks like someone is trying to do some evil thing. Everyone thinks it’s a man named Mr. Bigg and he is trying to kill Pa, but there’s no evidence.

The Final Storylines

Meanwhile, there is a plot of a black man working in the camp paired with a white man who is against him. Although Michelle talks about historical accuracy in the back, I don’t think it’s very historically accurate to say that not only would they hire a black man (which was rare-although it did happen), but most of the people in the camp would be against the racist person. Indeed, almost the entire populace was racist at that time, and I would not support an attempt to hide that. Michelle definitely did a lot of hard work in researching the time period and younger people can learn quite a bit from it but it’s also modernized and there were many instances when I saw there was no way stuff like that was taking place in that time period. It leans more towards fiction than historical, but the history she includes is definitely helpful and is presented in a positive way instead of lecturing.

A lot of the rest of the book is about the development and solving of the plot, including Grace at least partially reconciling with her father, recognizing he’s not the same man who went away to war. Could all the rumors be totally off base? Could Grace step in to save another death?

Review

The book is 180 pages (about 48,000 words), and is very quick and easy to read. It’s mainly for girls 10 and up, but I’d say probably 9 is a good age to read this story and it would probably be too old by the age of 12. The mystery is unpredictable (the truth is not really hinted at) and really cannot be known up until it’s stated plainly. The writing is pretty simple, but also high quality. This is a self-published book (her first one with an editor), and you can see the difference between a professionally published book and this one. As I said, though, the writing is still decent and by no means too difficult to understand for the age. She doesn’t use many words that would seem to expand people’s vocabularies that I noticed, either, though.

This is a good read for the age group, and is interesting and if anything too fast-moving (as stated with the mystery there is not much anticipation or build up as to the true identity). Although there is some preachiness and a clear desire to get a message across, it doesn’t interfere much with the storyline (of course, the storyline is built largely around her message). The preachiness is nothing compared to most books for young kids/young adults. Modern day people will be able to identify with Grace, although her struggles may seem foreign to many of them, it seems that they would be able to relate to them. Grace is certainly not a dislikable character, despite her anger and other traits.

My overall rating is a 2.25/5.0. I would give the book a 2.75/5.0 because of the interesting plot, decent writing and characters, but take off half a point for the impractical advice as noted above. If it had been published professionally and edited in that way the rating would probably also be higher.

Although to the average book reviewer that might seem like a poor rating, according to my rating system 2.25 is around or a little higher than most books would get and means I think it is a good book for a certain portion of the population. For nine and ten year old girls especially this would be a solid book to read and can be just over “recommended”.

Thank you very much for reading and if you’d like to purchase it here is the link for the Kindle, the Nook, or paperback (affiliate link) version. If you’d like to read more reviews like these you can get this feed.

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