Chanticleer Book Reviews

Author: bonnie-stanard

  • DUST ON THE BIBLE by Bonnie Stanard, a moving coming-of-age story

    DUST ON THE BIBLE by Bonnie Stanard, a moving coming-of-age story

    A poignant tale from start to finish, Dust on the Bible by Bonnie Stanard is a vivid and emotionally captivating story about the strife of a family living in rural South Carolina in 1944.

    Lily, a twelve-year-old farm girl, wraps readers around her heart. While struggling to understand the mysteries of death, God, family, and school bullies, she endures poverty and agonizes over her missing father. Lily is hungry for knowledge, but a sixth grade bully turns school attendance into misery. Lily is an easy target; she is quiet, poor, and wears homemade feed sack dresses. This is Lily’s story, one year of her life when she transitions from childhood innocence to the edge of her awakening.

    Readers first see Lily on a cold, October morning, while she warms her backside in front of the cook stove. Stanard does a superb job in crafting imagery that evokes the senses; readers can see the small kitchen and feel the morning chill. The author’s descriptive words and phrases are fresh and easy to relish as readers follow Lily through the seasons, from bitter winter to scorching summer.  

    Lily’s consummate yearning to know what happened to her father moves the plot steadily forward. No one will talk to her about him, but she keeps asking. And every time she does, it causes trouble. Lily is bright, curious, and needs answers. When family members do reply to her questions, they keep comments short and simple; they shirk her questions to try to shield her from something they believe that she doesn’t need to know. But, this creates even more questions and adds fuel to her active imagination. Nonetheless, their answers paint character sketches of each person in the story.

    Grandpa owns the one-thousand-acre cotton farm that he runs without the help of a tractor. He and Grandma have opened their home for four of their five adult children, including Lily’s mother and Lily herself. The overcrowded home is without indoor plumbing, cold on frosty winter mornings, and oppressing with stifling heat in the summer. They all share the endless chores and the long days of hard-scrabble living for a meager living.

    Stanard creates a family with a non-nonsense way of life, but the family also carries a deep abiding love for each other; no matter what. Even when Lily’s youngest uncle, Archie, goes overseas, despite the family’s subdued fear, their love for him shines through in their reaction to the letters he writes to them.

    Stanard has created a strong protagonist in Lily—one  in whom we can feel the relentlessness and restlessness of youth as shown in one of my favorite lines in her work.

    “She daydreamed of sleeping late as she wanted to. Of swimming in Ma George’s pond. Of catching lightening bugs and building forts. Of shooting the .22 rifle.  Most of all she wanted Grandpa to teach her to change gears so she could drive the pickup.”

    A few paragraphs later, Lily’s reality ensues.

    “Don’t matter whether she wants to. Lily’s old enough to know what work means,” said Florence. [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][Lily’s mother replied to Grandpa when he told Florence that maybe it was too hot for the twelve-year-old Lily to work in the summer afternoons.]

    Stanard’s writing deftly shapes the narrative and the setting. Her pitch perfect dialogue conveys Lily’s “tween” age while conveying the social strata of her world. Readers are pulled into her thoughts, her reactions, and the family dialogue––walking through her world, seeing it through her eyes, and feeling it through her heart. Lily is a brave individual seeking to find her own place in the world while enduring difficult times on many fronts.

    Dust on the Bible is a moving novel with an honest perspective of what it was like for some who grew up in poverty in the South during the Second World War. The coming-of-age story of Lily is candidly related, drawing on all the senses. Lily’s story and her world will linger with readers long after they’ve finished reading the final pages.

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  • MASTER OF WESTFALL PLANTATION by Bonnie Stanard, a historical novel

    MASTER OF WESTFALL PLANTATION by Bonnie Stanard, a historical novel

    Bonnie Stanard exposes some of the greatest plights of those who suffered from human bondage and slavery in her book Master of Westfall Plantation. Readers will be pulled into the novel’s eloquent prose that paints the tragic moments of the antebellum South. This captivating and well-researched story will resonate with you long after you read the final page.

    Set in Charleston, South Carolina and a nearby island shortly before the Civil War, the book introduces the central character Tilmon Goodwyn. He is cold toward his beautiful wife Georgiana (who is secretly shamed by her humble background), manipulative and suspicious of his widowed mother Phoebe, (who may be flirting with a sophisticated con man), and extremely cruel to slaves (while believing himself benevolent).

    Tilmon blunders through the business of running a large plantation, yet, underpinned by the pernicious institution of slavery, manages to prosper nonetheless. Given to gambling and pleasing himself, he has already impregnated one slave and developed a seething lust for another—young Kedzie, who has a mind towards freedom and a deep hatred of her master that only stirs his passion more.

    Passing his days in questionable business dealings, watching as his foreman lashes his slaves for the smallest infractions, Tilmon gives us little to like. The only time this arrogant husband, indifferent father, maladroit manager, and cruel overlord shows a smidgen of tender feeling is when Billy, a favorite slave, dies, probably having ingested poison meant for Tilmon himself—but administered by whom?

    Meanwhile Georgiana, meeting by chance with the abolitionist preacher who raised her, plots to have Kedzie sent north via the Underground Railroad, not in sympathy for the girl’s terrible circumstances, but as revenge for her husband’s flagrant infidelity.

    In a telling moment, Georgiana hears the laughter of gypsies and wonders how “a person of such poor circumstance could find anything funny,” not grasping that it is freedom, not wealth, which brings happiness. Readers will no doubt want to cling to hope for Kedzie to find a way out of hardship. As the novel ends, there are muted mentions of events in Kansas and elsewhere that may influence Tilmon’s dark empire that he rules with an iron hand and a perverted morality.

    Bonnie Stanard is a freelance writer and editor whose skills come to the fore in this work, with finely honed language that at times borders on the poetic. Master of Westfall Plantation is part of a series, for which Stanard has assiduously researched her subject matter, even attaching a lengthy bibliography. She focuses on the evil of slavery, expressing, in a brief introduction, her conviction that “a man of good will who conforms to a bad culture is more bad than good.”

    The hopeless plight of those who suffered from human bondage and slavery is fervently depicted in the authentic voices of the “low country.” Stanard’s portrayal of Tilmon and other slave masters who believed themselves “righteous and good” chronicles the juxtapositions that permeated the antebellum South. This unrelenting pessimism and, at times, almost complete lack of even a ray of hope can make the read intense and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, Master of Westfall Plantation is a brilliant work speaking honestly of an unspeakable wrong.

    The Master of Westfall Plantation is a companion novel to Kedzie, Saint Helena Island Slave (2012),  Sonny, Cold Slave Cradle (2013), and Westfall, Slave to King Cotton (2014). All four novels compose the well-researched and well-told Westfall series by Bonnie Stanard.