Varina

By Charles Frazier, 345 pages, Ecco, 2018
Reviewed by Sharon Stasiowski, April 15, 2020

I had mentioned this book in my last review and at that time was giving it my "read 100 pages before quitting." I am glad that I continued to read it and passed the 100 page mark and kept right on going. I am still not a fan of his writing, but in spite of that, the historical fictional story he told of Varina Howell Davis' life was very interesting. The story begins in 1906, the last year of her life and is told in reminiscences to a black man who had been a part of her life as a boy during the Civil War and was with her as she fled Richmond when the war ended. He came to see her to fill in the blanks of his memories of that time and then each time they meet, he asks her questions about the rest of her life. She did not have a happy marriage to Jefferson Davis, and I don't believe that she even liked him. In the beginning she was very young and had high hopes, but he was much older than she, and a widower whose first wife was the love of his life. He does not come across as anyone I would ever care to read about. If you are interested in the Civil War and its aftermath, I recommend this book about a strong, resilient woman.

On the back of the book there are one-sentence reviews all gushing over Charles Frazier's writing. I am going to quote two of them. "No writer today crafts more exquisite sentences than Charles Frazier." (USA Today) "Reading a Frazier novel is like listening to a fine symphony. He's a maestro whose pen is his baton, beckoning the best that each sentence has to offer." (Denver Post)

That says it all. I simply am not impressed with a man's sentences that do not tell a straight forward tale but seem to convey his interest is more in his writing than the story he is telling. His sentences were the slog that took me 100 pages to find the story. Just a note: the reviewers were trying to outdo Charles Frazier.