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Through a Glass, Darkly
Charlotte A. Miller
NewSouth Books
978-1-58838-054-8
$27.95 hardcover
6 x 9
341 pages
Published in 2001
Fiction
Charlotte Miller’s debut novel, Behold, This Dreamer, was a regional success story when it first appeared. Hard times and continuing setbacks are the two constants in the second installment of Miller’s Southern trilogy, which takes young Janson Sanders and his bride, Elise Whitley, forward into the struggles of the Depression. The story opens with Elise pregnant and cast out by her wealthy family for marrying the hot-blooded Sanders, who is half Cherokee. Janson gets a job working in a mill near the small town where he grew up, but his efforts to get ahead come to naught when a bank run costs him his savings; the Depression takes a double toll when Elise’s father commits suicide after being ruined. Janson’s attempts to find a home for his family prove equally problematic, partly because of small-town bigotry, but mostly because Buddy Eason, the bullying grandson of the mill owner, has his eyes on Janson’s wife. Janson turns to sharecropping to make a living, but his ongoing feud with Eason shifts into high gear when Janson is accused of a murder engineered by Buddy and his friends.The final chapters find Janson back working in the mill as his young son, Henry, begins to take center stage, and the author closes with a fitting ending for Buddy Eason.
Reviews
“Miller has a sympathetic feel for the struggles of rural life in the South during this period, and she creates well-drawn, memorable characters . . . Miller spins an intriguing web of intertwined tales; those who enjoy well-crafted popular fiction set in this era and locale have much to look forward to as the Sanders family enters the war years.”
Publishers Weekly
“Like her first novel, Through a Glass, Darkly is a good read, a page turner, with suspense generated on almost every page.”
Charlie Rose, the Montgomery Advertiser
”Charlotte Miller has given us a story of how love and honor can wage a cruelly uneven battle against greed, arrogance, poverty, malevolent evil, and the unmerciful hand of fate—and yet, somehow, prevail. The book is a triumph of storytelling. The story is a triumph of the human spirit.”
Robert Inman, author of Dairy Queen Days
”In Through a Glass, Darkly, Charlotte Miller invokes the deep rural South, and a time, a place, and a people so accurately that one can almost hear the beat of a heart, the touch of a hand on a cheek. . . . She is a true Southern author in the best sense of the word, and this book will leave her fans waiting for more.”
Rosemary Danielle, author of Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex and Suicide in the Deep South and Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist
Links
Also by Charlotte A. Miller:
Behold, This Dreamer, hardcover
Behold, This Dreamer, paperback
There is a River
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