TEST
Sarah Bird misses the mark by a wide mile as she relates the real-life tale of Miss Cathay Williams (the author persists in misspelling her name as ‘Cathy’ throughout), a prominent figure in the Civil War who was a Buffalo Soldier, living her life posing as a man so she could find her scattered family, get to the West, and experience freedom.
When the plantation on which she’s enslaved is conquered by General Philip Sherridan, Cathay – whose skinny form enables her to pass for a boy – is conscripted, at gunpoint, into his army unit as the company’s cook!
Cathay knows that there’s a future out there for her that has nothing to do with being the claimed property of Sherridan. On her way to the military camp, she holes up in a barn and meets a dying soldier. From him, she learns that she might be able to battle her way to freedom – if she’s clever. She and that soldier begin to fall in love – her strong link back to the Africa he’s never been to, forged by her mother and grandmother’s memories of life there as warrior royalty, stuns and beguiles him – but all is lost when he seemingly succumbs to his wounds. She learns too late that his name is Wagner Swayne.
Cathay becomes an assistant cook to Solomon Yarnell, who both takes her under his wing, and punishes her misbehavior to equal degrees. Reunited with her sister, Clemmie, and another important party when the war is over, Cathay plans on marrying Solomon and moving out west, but is ripped from his arms. Lost in grief but still clinging to her dreams, she then adopts the guise of William Cathay and joins the Buffalo Soldiers. Still holding out hope that the west will offer her promise, she instead finds herself dodging discovery and prejudice of many stripes while reporting to an incompetent superior, and involved in an endless war against Native Americans the government wishes to see rounded up and killed so that white settlers may take their land. Cathay nonetheless works her way towards a marksman’s medal. But what will Cathay do when she is discovered? And will she ever earn Sherridan’s respect?
Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen had so much potential. The book does do several things right, including the excellent points made about the way black men and women had to live through horrors and debasement, to eke out survival, and of the lies they were forced to tell to the white people they loathed to make it to some semblance of survival. The novel’s battle scenes are properly rousing, and the observations of army life feel realistic and work well, as do the well-detailed difficulties of posing as someone of the opposing sex.
But the author falls into several traps when it comes to portraying her black characters as well-rounded people (and is far, far worse at portraying the native American characters who appear later in the text), and sadly, stereotypes permeate the novel. While Cathay almost springs to life as a full-blooded woman, in several ways she comes off as a breathing chunk of cardboard.
To accomplish what she must with her character, Bird hopelessly skews the timeline; adding two important relationships for Cathay that didn’t happen to her in real life, and does a great disservice to her by basing her motivation solely around a forbidden romance she never experienced.
Building Cathay’s initial purpose around impressing Sherridan is false and faulty, and not the least bit squirmworthy. There are lots of weirdly worshipful portrayals of white bodies in some segments of the text, which makes no sense for Cathay’s point of view, as all of the white people Cathay has encountered in her life before Sherridan have abused her (this is counterbalanced later on by Swayne’s fetishizing her blackness). She even spies on a white lesbian couple making love and admires their freedom and forms in a scene that exists for no reason other than to titillate the audience. There are other moments – like Cathay visiting a prostitute to prove Bill’s ‘manhood’ – which are similarly cringeworthy.
I could write a book of my own about the other unnecessary moments like that which crop up in the story like chunks of cow crud, moments like the scene in which Cathay smiles when Colonel Sherridan calls her a ‘splendid specimen’. Even worse is an encounter between Cathay, her regiment and a tribe of Seminole led by John Horse. If Bird’s black characters are wooden stereotypes, Ms. Bird’s native characters suggest her only contact with any First Nations person has been limited to John Wayne movies (also Ms. Bird is wrong, white people did try to enslave native people).
But worst of all is the love story between Cathay and Swayne, which is instantaneously built and completely ahisoric. Cathay was married once, and it was a bad marriage in which her property was stolen; Swayne was not involved with her nor was he anywhere near her regiment during crucial parts of the story. Added to this, Swayne’s fetishization of her blackness is at best uncomfortable and at worst cringeworthy, and works to diminish Cathay’s true motivations and reason for survival (which had nothing to do with a white general she never met), and her love for him is created as an all-consuming influence, inserted poorly as an attempted catalyst for her future behavior. The author seems to want to do nothing more than mill some pulp from their forbidden romance, when Cathay’s story was about so much more.
Research failures also abound. Would Cathy know what a brown recluse spider was by name when she doesn’t know what a ferret is? A crucial plot point involves the amputation of Cathay’s toes, which didn’t happen until after her time in the service ended. There are other bizarre writing quirks, like the author’s insistence on censoring out curse words while describing death in the most brutal manner possible.
Cathay’s sister Clemmie – who pulls herself together, becomes a camp follower and gains a lot of grit and spit along the way – has just as interesting a way about her but receives the narrative short shrift. Maybe if the author had fictionalized her less-known life it would’ve been more interesting than the book we’ve ended up with.
Buy it at: Amazon/Barnes & Noble/iBooks/Kobo
Grade: F
Book Type: Historical Fiction
Sensuality: Kisses
Review Date: 06/09/18
Publication Date: 09/2018
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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My main problem with the book was the author’s lack of research in some critical areas. The Indian wars of Texas were fought against the Comanche and Kiowa tribes, not the Apache. While some Chiracahua Apache did make raids into Texas, they were not the persistent antagonist to White settlement posed by the Comanche and Kaiahua. At another point, Cathay refers to a buffalo as being “as big as a battleship“… a warship which did not exist until the launching of the HMS Dreadnought in 1908. She would not have used that term anymore than she would’ve referred to a bright star is looking like “a satellite.“ Most perplexing was her frequent reference to the sergeant’s sextant, which is supposedly used to pin down the locations of various watering holes in West Texas. A sextant is basically useless if you cannot see a true horizon (which is why they are mostly used at sea). With the Davis Mountains all around them, no true horizon would’ve been available. Further, a sextant does not work unless one has the proper astral almanac, in which the latitude and longitude would be printed. They had no such book with them. And finally, they were not carrying a chronometer with them, without which, one cannot determine the precise time in Greenwich, England, even if you did have the current year’s navigation almanac A chronometer is essential in using a sextant for determining latitude and longitude. A “watch” would not have sufficed, in the 1800s, or even today, because watches are not accurate enough over long periods of time. But this was no problem for the author. As far as one can tell the sergeant did not even have a watch. The way it was presented in the book, one need only look through a sextant and then simply read out the latitude and longitude of a location. If only it had been that easy, sextants would’ve been used throughout the west. There are good reasons, unavoidable reasons, why they were not.
The research really was off.
This book is on sale today for 2.99. It’s a 4.5 star read at Amazon from 105 readers. I post this in case anyone was on the fence about the book!
https://amzn.to/2EZuRsm
I can’t get past the first chapter! Sheridan is told she’s a girl but then refers to her as a boy – “liberate him for the union.”
This may seem like a minor complaint but it jarred me right out of the story and I can’t seem to get back into it.
Now after reading your review I wonder if I should even try…
You pointed up another problem I had with the book; that Cathay is supposed to be posing as a boy in the first fourth of the book, but she’s continuously seen as female, and indeed is portrayed as wearing feminine garb while cooking for the camp – which actually makes sense, because she didn’t start posing as Bill until she joined the Buffalo Soldiers. I found that very confused, timeline-wise.
I tend to steer clear of novels that tell the story of a real-life person. Historical fiction that includes real-life people is one thing – I’d be disappointed in any novel about World War II that didn’t at least mention Hitler, Churchill or FDR, for example – but putting words and feelings into the mouth of someone who actually existed, who actually had words and feelings they could tell us about if they were here, to interpret the experiences we know about to make a fictional story out of them, feels disrespectful and false to me. That said, I just recently saw a novel about Eleanor Roosevelt that I really want to read. :-)
I just tried and failed to read My Dear Hamilton because the fictionalized tone of the book didn’t work for me. I loved the history but not the novelization of it. It’s a hard balance to find.
A large sector of historical fiction is biographical, and for sure, some are much more well-written than others. I maintain I learned more about history from reading good historical fiction than I ever learned in history lessons at school, and one of my favourite HF novels of all time is Sharon Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour which is a fictionalised account of the life of Richard III. I read those sorts of novels avidly in my teens and still love them, but as Dabney says, a lot of it depends on how the information is presented to the reader. I can’t be doing with Philippa Gregory for example.
I think a lot depends on tone. I adore historical fiction and I tend to be willing to give a lot of leeway (I gave an A to Another Side of Paradise even though it insinuated F. Scott Fitzgerald fathered Sheilah Graham’s daughter, which never could have happened) but sometimes you just have to throw your hands up.
Only Call Us Faithful, the story of southern Union spy Liza Van Lew, is my favorite fictionalization of an amazing Civil War woman. I wrote a DIK review for it here and can’t recommend it highly enough. Meticulously researched but also a gripping read.
Ooh, thank you for the rec!
I don’t necessarily think it’s fair to judge a novel on how historically accurate it is but that’s just me. I’ve really enjoyed several other books by Sarah Bird. The best mystery I’ve read in a while, The Ruin, fudged facts. In this case, the author used a technology that didn’t exist yet to solve the crime. She wrote, in the afterwards, why she’d done that–to tell the story. I realize that there are readers for whom historical accuracy is hugely important. But for me, I really just care about how well an author tells her story.
I think that happens in mysteries and thrillers a fair bit, and it doesn’t really bother me, as usually whatever the gizmo is, it’s within the bounds of possibility/probability. But getting facts about an actual person wrong – in my mind – is a completely different kettle of fish.
That’s I think my biggest problem – I would’ve given this a much, much higher grade if maybe the author had taken a full move into a deeper fictionalization – something on the level of say, Joe Lansdale’s Bubba Ho Tep.
But misspelling her first name constantly and centering all of Cathay’s motivations around impressing Swayne just left me cold. Cathay was, for the slim written record we have about her, motivated by a desire to be the best markswoman in the Buffalo Soldiers, and that’s motivation enough IMO.
For me, historical fiction is like the line between My Dear Hamilton – which was a great fictionalization of Eliza Hamiton’s life in my opinion – and Therese Fowler’s Z, which insists that all of the joy and zest and joie de vivre with which Zelda lived her life was just playacting to keep up with Scott and she was “really” a “good girl” who didn’t like partying and wanted to be a mother because we “don’t have a written record of who Zelda really was” (in fact several of her diaries and many of her letters have survived, enough to make a published volume).
Basically, if it’s going to be historical fiction the real people being portrayed in the book should still sound like the actual historical beings being portrayed in the text and the record shouldn’t deviate too much from historical record, unless you’re going with alternate history or speculative fic. And even THEN they should sound like themselves, but that’s my opinion!
Interesting and well-written review, Lisa. Giving a book an F with clear, concise and unbiased reasons for it is a real skill and very hard to achieve. Congratulations on this. I would probably not have been attracted to this book anyway as the story line holds no particular interest for me but I always read the 1 star amazon reviews because some of them are the most pertinent and best-written of them all. I have written them myself on amazon a few times and either others concur and thank you for it or you get rubbished. The only rubbish here seems to be the book itself.
Thank you so much!! Glad you found it helpful!