The Last Heiress

Well, I really wasn't intending to read this one just now. I've got others that I'm supposed to be reading, but I managed to hit “currently-reading” last night while trying to mark it as an owned book, and friends liked my status, so...I read it! What else am I to do with a snow day?

This is my first Mary Ellis book, and I did enjoy it. The characters were layered—some bad, some good—and even the amiable heroine has bouts of bad temper and spats with her brother-in-law, who is actually quite a decent fellow. The history is very well done and the city well-researched. It seemed that Ellis did a great job of capturing how life was going on in Wilmington right up to the time the soldiers came, and it didn't feel like a regular 1864 novel because of the setting...not one that's often explored by authors, who usually focus on the conflict instead of the home front. She also made some really compelling moral points about slavery vs. big labor, which were quite interesting. I knew that many factories had such practices, though they went largely unchallenged until a generation or so later; slavery became a political issue while factory workers up north faced even worse living conditions than many slaves, so it was a good illustration of the paradox of what should be done with workers, whether owned or paid.

I think what I liked best, past the history and setting, was how human her characters were. They were learning and growing in a new social situation that none of them, rich or poor, English or American, slave or free, could have no idea how to handle.