All Parts Together
By Tom Mach
Reviewed by Stephanie Dower

Spanning 1863 to mid-1865, Tom Mach’s second volume in the Jessica Radford Trilogy following his well-received “Sissy!” continues the winning fictional saga of individuals struggling in the throes of the Civil War.  Moving through the disjointed states from Kansas to Tennesse, Baltimore to Washington, D.C., and Chicago to Alabama, the characters brave the turns of fortune and their passions.  Affected viscerally by the strain and relentless dehumanization of the war, they tumble through the heartbreak of a nation divided and their lives upturned.  Mach’s characters give us poingnant insight into the souls of people pushed into the divide separating, belief and faith, loyalty and love and the consequences of fate.

Heroine Jessica, fresh from the pain of her parents’ murder, breaks away from the smoldering ruins of Lawrence, Kansas and the attentions of the half-Cherokee Methodist minister who woos her.  She starts anew in her aunt’s employ as nanny in Washington, DC.  This situation presents her with opportunities to meet many fascinating and formative influences, among them poet Walt Whitman, suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and even President Abraham Lincoln himself.  As the war to unify the nation battles its way through the south, the friends and family she loves struggle to gain some balance and resolution to the effects of war on their lives.

The tumult of warfare reflects itself not only in Jessica’s emotional questioning, but in those of the characters so closely bound to her:  former slave now adopted sister Nellie finding her way in the midst of emancipation, Sara lonelied by her husband’s muster with the Confederacy, Roger confounded in the heat of the battlefield’s very personal life and death decisions, Matt wavering between the two women who hold his heart.  Mach interweaves the path of their stories throughout the novel, the result of which causes each to affected the other in deep and lasting ways.

Incorporating the cumulative triumphs and defeats in the military arena, Mach keenly mirrors similarly cumulative success and dishelvelment in his characters’ journeys of survival.  A brigade order that twists the fate of the Union army engages the reader with empathy for characters whose fortunes turn on such similarly small or pivotal decisions and actions.  As soldiers waver between battle lines and armies between victories and losses, each character faces similar changes of heart and opinion of their very lives:  who is enslaved and to what forces or decisions do they owe their enslavement?

Mach succeeds by far in brilliant naming of his second volume in the Jessica Radford Trilogy.  In reference to Walt Whitman “...sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together,” this apt sentiment colors this ultimately ethical, emotional and truly heartfelt tale.