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Review title: History in stereotype
Product review: Hicks' multi-layered approach to storytelling masks a basic flaw: his underlying research merely rakes the topsoil of Southern stereotypes. Carrie McGavock has a story to tell and records exist to tell it. Whether Hicks needed lessons in the methodology and raw source materials for researching historical lives or whether he simply ignored the realities of Carrie's personal world is a story that remains to be told. E. Jones's 2003 KNOWN WORLD, set in Virginia, successfully avoided this hazard by using purely fictional characters to explore a long-ignored side of Southern slaveholding. Elsewhere (Louisiana), last year's ISLE OF CANES by E. Mills sets the bar for using real lives to probe the many layers of Southern racial strife. Fiction is fiction, but when writers use a real person to portray the past, they owe it to that person to be true to his or her real self.
