Reviews for The raider
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Two decades before the Civil War the area that is now west Tennessee--once the land of the Chickasaws--was still largely unsettled. A man could clear a space in the wilderness and if he were judged to be industrious and enterprising he might receive some help from the Indians. Elias McCutcheon was such a man, the first, most prosperous, and as it turns out, the natural leader of a community of farmers, traders, planters, eventually soldiers. Regionalist Ford has painstakingly recreated the settings and the day-to-day procedures necessary for the survival of even the hardiest souls in a land which did not yield its rewards all that easily. There are terrible calamities--McCutcheon's wife Jane is disfigured for life in a raid. And though the attack is avenged to the settlers' economic advantage, Jane's wounds of body and spirit never heal. Then the war divides Tennessee and McCutcheon becomes a reluctant warrior (McCutcheon's Raiders) more out of loyalty to his neighbors than to the ideals of the Confederacy. Ford has brought various elements together in a style of conscious plainness which has the effect of creating a certain distance between the characters and the reader. You have to admire his workmanship however much you may not care to have all the stitches show. Copyright ŠKirkus Reviews, used with permission.
