Though Waters Roar by Lynn Austin

"God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. Psalm 46:1-3

The story begins with Harriet in a jail cell in 1920. While there she has time to remember her ancestors and their lives. Lynn Austin uses flashback beginning with Hannah during the days leading up to the Civil War and her involvement with the Underground Railroad. Bebe helped Hannah care for the runaways then and when WWI took Bebe's brothers to war she did their farm chores. Later she fought the use of drink in the Christian Temperance Union when her husband Horatio was controlled by alcohol. The Great Flood of 1876 was a pivotal event in the lives of Harriet's grandmother, grandfather and mother as well as those displaced by the waters when the dam broke. Through all these events we get a picture of life in America for the rich and poor and how God was working in them. Harriet is moved by Bebe's passion to win the vote for women and always to help others as she could. Maybe this is why Harriet was in jail.

March by Geraldine Brooks

This is the story of Mr. March the shadowy father figure in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”. We first encounter March working as a Union Chaplain during the Civil War trying to find ways of writing cheerful letters home while surrounded by the wanton cruelty, racism and ignorance of the war which he is helpless to prevent. Throughout this story weaves his early history as a peddler traveling across the South to make his fortune, his encounter with the Clements and their educated slave girl Grace, whom he meets again as the war takes him across the same path. His courtship and early married life with Marmee, a girl with a temper and frustrated by the role of women. His friendships with Emerson and Thoreau and the loss of his fortune. March becomes a school teacher for the black “contraband” on a plantation, but when the Confederates attack, the story is taken up by his wife, Marmee, who comes to find him in a Washington hospital. She gives us different eyes to view the past years as she uncovers the parts of her husband’s life of which he has never spoken.