Twelfth Night

by Michael Llewellyn

The year is 1857, New Orleans' Golden Era when cotton and rice, sugar, and slavery buoyed the exotic city to rare wealth as America's fourth metropolis. It is half a century since Napoleon ceded Louisiana to the young United States, yet relations between French Creoles and Americans remain strained.

Downriver lies the carré de la ville, last bastion of the old Creole families, while upriver is the Garden District of the American nouveau riche. The neutral ground is Canal Street. These two widely disparate cultures share neither language nor religion, customs nor cuisine. The xenophobic Catholic Creoles dismiss the Americans as greedy bourgeois boors while the industrious Protestant Americans find the Creoles impossibly aloof and decadent, obsessed with opera, theater, balls, and dueling. Business dealings frequently wrest a crossing of paths, but diehards on both sides of Canal resist social commingling.

Those attempting to bridge the schism often flirted with disaster. This is the story of two such pilgrims meeting on Twelfth Night and confronting their fragile fate on Ash Wednesday. Their destiny, unfolding against the tawdry glamour and raw violence of Mardi Gras, is as heady as carnival itself.

370 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 1997

About the author

My mom claims I started writing with my first box of Crayolas, with the dining room wall as my tabula rasa. I come by my passion naturally with a grandmother who was a published novelist and Methodist minister grandfather who wrote powerhouse sermons. The women in my family were memorists before it was trendy and a writer cousin, James Agee, won the Pulitzer. I hail from Fountain City, TN, and carry all the picaresque baggage from a '50s Southern childhood.

I spent the '70s and '80s in Greenwich Village. Although I never wrote the Great American Novel (as planned) I sold a bunch of Southern historical romances and adventure sagas before heading to New Orleans to water my Southern roots. My fascination with that city led to more books, my newest being "Creole Son." It's about French painter Edgar Degas and his sojourn to 1872 Louisiana that forever changed his style.

My ongoing wanderlust eventually landed me in California Wine Country which is surely some of God's most beautiful handiwork. When I'm not working on my new book I'm hiking the hilly vineyards and seaside cliffs and wondering how this Tennessee boy got so far from home.

Reviews

[Jwsrauch · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much in like w this author. After reading Tales of the City, searched for similar tales about New Orleans, found w/ Alex in Wonderland, aka Michael LaCroix. Since finishing his Alex series, have read "Creole Son" and this book. If you love New Orleans, it's history, and want to devour a good summer read, get at these...