Redfish Oak ISBN: 9780997598650 On-Target Words (Kindle Edition) copyright and written by George Putnam and Jewel Grutman.
The authors have set forth a historical novel covering the often viscous post- Civil War Era particularly in the south. Four hundred year old St. Augustine, FL is the setting. Young, beautiful and well educated Nan Carew is living temporally in town with her father Lance, a distinguished lawyer, while their mansion is being renovated. Nan, along with another lovely young woman, Abigail Kearney, teaches black children and is attempting to educate them to converse more with whites. Nan befriends a young black boy, Lija Taylor, who is in her class and also Boy Hunting, a young Kiowa Indian brought into the area with a number of other Kiowa and Cheyenne by Captain Pratt as an experiment to train Indians in white man’s ways, who is also being taught by the two young women and their mentor. When Abigail is killed under mysterious circumstances, former Confederate General Wood, a dedicated black/Indian hater, now St. Augustine’s Sheriff, arrests Lije’s father. Nan, a headstrong and most determined individual decides to fight the unleashed open hatred of blacks and Indians exhibited by Wood and others and the story escalates into a suspenseful thriller peopled by these and other interestingly characterized villains and heroes.
Discussion: A captivating tale provided by unusual authors and containing characters a reader can love and hate while learning of a most vicious prejudicial era simultaneously with a sizeable number of historical facts well documented by the list of authoritative individuals and references included.
5* Suspenseful thriller with authentic historical bases.