Too Ambitious

by Susan Overby Swanson

This novel is an uplifting, multilayered portrait of a group of individuals, most of whom are new to the Louisiana river road community. There’s the “passing” African-American beauty in search of a fair shake. There are the underpaid, underprivileged construction workers. There’s their greedy boss and his conniving architect. Add to that the lonely, regret-filled Cuban who’s lost all that ever mattered and the feisty, seemingly silly sixty-two year-old who quibbles with a husband who’s gambling on the sly while they’re building a home in the tiny historic town, and the pot begins to boil. Personal, social, and ethical concerns arise. Ripe with both the quaintness and strangeness of the river road, the story is essentially a mystery about why a state legislator and doctor – antecedent, too, of the passing African-American -- was killed in a duel where the friend he’d chosen for a second insisted on the second shot that killed him. Just as mysterious is the doctor’s wife who, playing organ in the church in front of which the duel took place, finished Mass though told her husband was dying. Based on a real-life 1874 duel in St. James Parish, this tender, moving story is about race, guilt, and history.

342 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 30, 2013

About the author

Susan Overby Swanson majored in English and journalism at the University of Minnesota back in the late fifties, when “Hound Dog” and “Mack the Knife” were big hits and a gallon of gas cost twenty-four cents. So, to put it gently, she’s history personified. And history is what drew her to the Louisiana River Road in 1986, when she left the Midwest for the South. She was soon so involved with history of St. James Parish that she was asked to write their promotional literature.

She’s been a church organist and piano accompanist for the Suzuki Violin program at the University of Minnesota. And she’s studied with the best – Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer prize-winning author – at a summer session of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

She now lives in New Orleans.