White Doves at Morning : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Not Burke's Best
Review: White Doves at Morning has the stark beauty and vivid imagery of all Burke's novels, but not it's strong plot. The many characters introduced are never fully developed beyond a few central personalities. No one can compare to James Lee Burke when he discribes with similes and all five senses the character's surroundings, in this novel the Cival War, but his similies wear thin in one passage as he strings one after the other and seems to lose his point. The hero of the story, Willie Burke, is in the vein of Billy Bob and Dave, heroes of Burke's two wonderful series, but one doesn't feel any greater empathy for Willie by having known him so well through Burke's other strong, defiant characters. The story ends rather abruptly and does not rap up the lose edges as cleanly as a fan of Burke's would expect. The story is a decent one if the reader does have expectations after having read Burke's other, nearly perfect novels. But a new reader of Burke should consider reading a second novel of his before judging his abilities on just this one.

Rating:
Summary: Struggles of the South
Review: White Doves at Morning shows a complete different way of thinking. Being raised a Yank, you are taught that North is good, South is bad. After I read this book, I started to think if what I was taught was wrong. Maybe the North is just as bad as the South during the war. The book goes into great detail of battles. With the details of seeing you pal blown to pieces, and not having a scratch on you. To read certain parts, you have to have a strong stomach. In the book, Willie Burke has a great adventure escaping death too many times to count. Willie is the kind of man who gets a kick out of makin smart remarks to Union and Confederate Leaders. Ain't nothing like asking the enemy where your division is. Willie brings the humor to the book, and two young ladies bring the drama to town. Miss Abby and her colored friend Flower make the South open their eyes. They both fight together to bring honor back into being a women. White Doves at Morning is about the real struggles of the South during the Civil War.

Rating:
Summary: Struggles of the South
Review: White Doves at Morning shows a complete different way of thinking. Being raised a Yank, you are taught that North is good, South is bad. After I read this book, I started to think if what I was taught was wrong. Maybe the North is just as bad as the South during the war. The book goes into great detail of battles. With the details of seeing you pal blown to pieces, and not having a scratch on you. To read certain parts, you have to have a strong stomach. In the book, Willie Burke has a great adventure escaping death too many times to count. Willie is the kind of man who gets a kick out of makin smart remarks to Union and Confederate Leaders. Ain't nothing like asking the enemy where your division is. Willie brings the humor to the book, and two young ladies bring the drama to town. Miss Abby and her colored friend Flower make the South open their eyes. They both fight together to bring honor back into being a women. White Doves at Morning is about the real struggles of the South during the Civil War.

Rating:
Summary: Reminds one of Owen Parry
Review: Willie Burke, James Lee's ancestor, shares billing in WHITE DOVES AT MORNING with Abigail Dowling, an abolitionist from Massachusetts who had traveled south to minister to Yellow Fever patients. There's also a conflicted plantation owner, Ira Jamison, who can't quite own up to his mulatto daughter Flower. And there are some wonderful villains: Rufus Atkins, an overseer on Jamison's Angola plantation, and Clay Hatcher, his second in command. Todd McClain, a New Iberia hardware store owner and leader of The White League is another miscreant.
There's not much of a plot until about two-thirds of the way through the book. Willie and his friends fight the Battle of Shiloh; Willie loses his best friend Jim; he's captured and sentenced to death, only to be saved by a guerrilla band. Willie pines for Abigail Dowling as does his friend Robert Perry, a plantation owner's son who spends the last two years of the war in an Ohio prison camp.
Things pick up after the war when Carrie LaRose, madamn of New Iberia's house of ill repute, sponsors a school for the newly freed slaves conducted by Abigail and Flower, whom Willie had taught to read prior to the war. Carrie pays for it with her death. Flower begins to carry a gun. Ira, who was wounded during The Battle of Shiloh, converts his plantation into a prison camp, a reference to the modern Angola prison. There's an epilogue at the end that resolves everything. What's refreshing is that some of the bad guys get away with it, as they do in real life.
If you like Owen Parry's Civil War novels, you might want to try this one. Parry and Burke are masters of dialect. Burke's Cajun accent for Carrie LaRose is dead-on perfect, as is Owen Parry's Welsh brogue for Abel Jones. They both also have a penchant for laying on the imagery with a trowel rather than a brush, the problem being that the pace slows and there's always a chance of repetition. The skin tightening over a character's face happened a bit too often in Burke's novel for this reader.