Winner, Walter Williams Major Work Award, Missouri Writers Guild, 2018.
This novel jumps ahead twenty years from the end of This Old World, though it retains the same setting--a valley of the St. Francis River in Madison County, Missouri. But things have changed in the community of Daybreak. A younger generation is on the rise, and old values are under strain. The communal, agrarian life that existed before the Civil War is disappearing as America falls under the sway of the Gilded Age, the Industrial Revolution, and the accelerated pace of life that portends the coming Twentieth Century. This novel takes on the growing rural/urban divide, the arrival of industrial methods to rural life, and the psychic cost of chasing that extra dollar of profit--themes as relevant today as they were in the 1880s.
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Chapter 1
August 1887
Charlotte Turner fidgeted on the dais as her son’s speech entered its twentieth minute. The crown of flowers on her head itched, and she longed to take it off. But the children of the community had made the crowns for all the original settlers as a school project, so on it would stay, grapevines and ivy and a strand of bittersweet.
She glanced down the row at the other originals. John Wesley Wickman, upright and pugnacious, fiercer in old age than he had ever been as a younger man, with his glassy gaze reflecting an inner confusion that accounted for his fits of vehemence. Marie Mercadier, similarly afflicted with an inward absence, but from an old head injury, not the erosion of time. And Charley Pettibone, a few years younger than the rest of them, placid as a plow ox, tamed by twenty years of good meals, no longer the rambunctious lad who showed up at the colony with nothing more than a sack of borrowed clothing.
Was that all of them? Just the four? So it was, all the rest gone, lost to time, age, war. So many never came back from the war, and those who did were not the same. Her late husband, for one. So now the next generation had to carry the torch, or so Newton was saying as she refocused her attention on his speech.
