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Blogs by Richard G Sharp
Pending Release: Jacob's Cellar 10/1/2012 10:56:15 AM
My 19th century historical novel, "Jacobs Cellar" is now in the production process at createspace.com and should be available in paperback on Amazon in about a month. The Kindle version should follow 2-3 weeks later. "Time is the Oven," the sequel to "Jacob's Cellar," should become available about a month after that schedule. "Jacob's Cellar" begins with a retelling of a family story of the long-forgotten "War of the Regulation," a rural North Carolina precursor to the Revolutionary War culminating in 1771, in which farmers took up arms against corrupt colonial officials and were put down decisively in the so-called Battle of Alamance. The family that is the focus of the tale is part of a German-speaking community that left North Carolina as refugees from that conflict, moving west to lawless Tennessee and eventually further west to Missouri. There, their descendants are caught up in the Mexican War (1846-48) for which Missourians provided many of the American troops. A decade later those troops would be the core of the ill-fated Missouri State Guard that would be converted to the Missouri component of the Confederate Army and be decimated in the Civil War.
The novel concerns those caught on the wrong side of history in most respects, participants in a journey leading to the disintegration of old cultural identities and assimilation into the larger society, while their individual triumphs and tragedies are tales of survival through these overwhelming events.
"Time is the Oven" is a kind of anti-Western, following the adventures of a young man (a boy in "Jacob's Cellar") beginning in post-Civil War Missouri, where he meets the legendary Jesse James and is unimpressed. Pursuing a difficult romantic relationship influenced by Frank Jame's love of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale," he undertakes an odyssey to Panama during the failed French canal project, eventually returning, older and arguably wiser, to Missouri for unanticipated reunions at the novel's conclusion.
