“Take a Peek” book reviews are short and (possibly) sweet, keeping the commentary brief and providing a little peek at what the book’s about and what I thought.

Synopsis:

(via Goodreads)

When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband’s three-hundred-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a farm or raise a child, must endure the darkest days of the war on her own. By the time Major Hockaday returns two years later, Placidia is bound for jail, accused of having borne a child in his absence and murdering it. What really transpired in the two years he was away?

Inspired by a true incident, this saga conjures the era with uncanny immediacy. Amid the desperation of wartime, Placidia sees the social order of her Southern homeland unravel as her views on race and family are transformed. A love story, a story of racial divide, and a story of the South as it fell in the war, The Second Mrs. Hockaday reveals how that generation–and the next–began to see their world anew.

My Thoughts:

While the premise sounded intriguing to me, the execution didn’t quite work so well.

Told through letters and miscellaneous documents, The Second Mrs. Hockaday has a scattered feel to it that makes investing in the story difficult. We first meet Placidia as she’s under arrest and awaiting trial, writing a letter to a beloved cousin. Her letters take us back to the beginning of her marriage, but then jump around in time, and later, the book includes journal pages she wrote during her husband’s absence as well as correspondence between members of the next generation in the family. Because of the jumping chronology, it’s hard to get a sense of which events are linked to which — which is unfortunate, as the kernel of the story is good.

Placidia’s impetuous marriage to the recently widowed Major takes place the day after she meets him, and they only have two days together as man and wife before he leaves to rejoin his troops, leaving Placidia in charge of both his plantation and his motherless child. Her struggle to keep the farm going, to nurture the young boy, and to protect a future with the man she barely knows is moving, and I couldn’t help admiring Placidia’s bravery.

However — the big reveal toward the end of the book when we discover the truth about Placidia’s supposed crime is absolutely obvious from the very beginning. Even though some smaller details offer surprises, the fact that the big secret is so easily guessed takes away some of the punch when awful events actually transpire. A more minor complaint is the lack of any narration (via letters) of anything from later in Placidia’s life. While we learn more from other people, it feels abrupt to lose her voice in telling her own story, as if only those earlier years contained the events she felt the need to document.

The Second Mrs. Hockaday is a touching look at a young bride struggling to create a marriage during the awful war years. Unfortunately, it just lacked some of the power I’d expected.

[A reader note: While I don’t typically think it’s fair to bring up ARC formatting problems in a review, since presumably those will be corrected by the time of publication, I feel that the horrible formatting of this particular ARC absolutely impacted my reading experience for the worse. It’s not fair to criticize the book for these errors, but at the same time, the difficulty I had in sorting out section breaks and all of the missing dates in the text definitely made this a less than stellar read. If I’d read a finished copy, it’s possible that I might have felt the story had a better flow.]

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The details:

Title: The Second Mrs. Hockaday
Author: Susan Rivers
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Publication date: January 10, 2017
Length: 272 pages
Genre: Historical fiction
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley