Tietam Cane by Lance Levens

Lance Levens is a highly-regarded, long-standing member of my writing group. He has a handful of novels out, some available on Amazon and more in the pipeline.  He's just released Mr. Hooks, which I've yet to read. I have, however, recently completed his altogether-different novel Tietam Cane. The protagonist is an unusually bright boy with an extensive vocabulary, but otherwise he's a typical white boy from middle Georgia, the author's home terf. Tietam has been brought up by his Confederacy-loving grandfather and is intensely loyal to his family. In the course of the book, however, his entrenched prejudices are reexamined to a certain extent.
I had so much sympathy for this boy--and his love for his family.  Being from the South and quite into genealogy, I’ve discovered that my adult male ancestors of soldiering-age in the Civil War period were almost all Confederate soldiers, nearly half of them dying on the battlefield.  It was sobering to discover this and to reflect upon how radically it changed the lives of their fatherless families.  Most of the women did remarry, but the devastation wrought by the war was severe, and I could appreciate Tietam's grandfather’s suffering at thoughts of ‘the boys’ (young soldiers who died for the Confederacy).  At the same time, it was interesting to watch Tietam’s oftentimes-painful shift from ‘little rebel’ to someone with a more open mind.
What I most appreciated about this novel were the incredibly rich, poetic descriptions and how Tietam perceived his world.  His commentary was often amusing, with one reviewer comparing him to Huck Finn. I can certainly see why. What a voice Tietam had regarding everything and everyone—and half the time even he didn’t understand why he reacted the way he did.  So little of what he said or did was planned or thought out, which is how it truly is so much of the time.  Tietam Cane was beautifully written and left me full of curiosity about the boy's future.