ARA Review by marshwj17+ of The Deserving

[marshwj17+]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, The Deserving.]

---

4 out of 5 stars

---

Share This Review

---

The Deserving

Rated 4 stars out of 5

“The Deserving” shines a light on a little-known arena of the Civil War – the Southwest, particularly New Mexico. Often overlooked by history books focused on the key battles in the East and South that shaped the outcome of the war, O’Brien brings to life the people and the skirmishes that defined the war years far from the epicenter of the fighting.

As an admixture of actual events and fictional characters, “The Deserving” sometimes walks a perilous line, but mostly it succeeds, often on the strength of its details. O’Brien apparently has done prodigious research on Confederate officers and their stratagems and movements, and he has created an archvillain in Confederate Lt. Aubrey McGrath, whose reprehensible actions, especially against O’Brien’s young hero, Emile, form a central element of the book.

Indeed, the story moves from the Civil War to decades later, when Emile and his wife, Carmen, are running an inn in Santa Fe. McGrath comes back into their lives, and his threat ends only in a final struggle between the two men that ends with Emile, wounded but the victor as McGrath meets his demise.

O’Brien deserves considerable praise for building a plot that takes his tale from the war to the latter 1800s in Santa Fe. The warm relationship between Emile and Carmen is another highlight.

I had a number of quibbles about the writing of this tale. The language is very plain and written in what seems to be an elementary reading level. Some of the punctuation is wrong, and O’Brien’s style wanders from straight historical exposition to imagined conversations to flowery descriptions of people who are made to seem larger than life. Moreover, paragraphs are very long – some even more than a page – which is intimidating to most readers. Many are imagined quotes – some, almost speeches – delivered from senior officers to their subordinates.

***
View The Deserving on Bookshelves