Midwest Book Review (MBR) included a look at Temping Skies, the final book in the Beyond the Wood series, in its December 2016 issue of Reviewer’s Bookwatch magazine.

Here’s what MBR reviewer Jack Mason had to say–although I took the liberty of moving the Critique portion of the review ahead of the Synopsis and reformatted it a bit:

 

An impressively gifted storyteller, this concluding volume of a truly outstanding Civil War era trilogy by Michael J. Roueche is as extraordinary and consistently entertaining a read as his first two novels. While very highly recommended for community library Historical American Fiction collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that Tempting Skies is also available in a Kindle format ($7.99), as are the first two volumes: Beyond The Wood (9780983756712, $17.99 PB, $4.99 Kindle) and A River Divides (9780983756767, $17.99 PB, $7.99 Kindle).

The third volume in Michael J. Roueche’s Beyond the Wood series, Tempting Skies is set some four decades after the conclusion of the American Civil War, and the former Kentucky slave, Victoria Richman, has passed away.

Among her belongings, her bereft family discovers a narrative she’s written recounting the summer of 1864 in Virginia and the Nation’s Capital. Mrs. Richman’s manuscript describes a defining year, full of fury, sorrow, dread, hate, hope and love in the lives that intersect hers:

Betsy Richman Henderson tries to escape once again her demoralizing dance with a still-scheming Lucius Walthrope, even as war’s devastation trudges southward toward her Shenandoah Valley homestead.

William Richman, at last a legally free man, painfully struggles to scrape away slavery’s emotional scars and remnant self-doubt. Amidst inner disarray and outer humiliation, he battles for his place in a new social order of liberty framed in 19th Century racism.

Victoria herself struggles to find meaning in her new life. Thoughtful and intelligent, she resists a mundane life far from the war and its shifting purpose as she lives and chronicles the dramatic climax of the Beyond the Wood Series.

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