Disguised gender identities, warfare, and thwarted romance all play a role in this many-layered novel, Seven Aprils, by award-winning fiction author Eileen Charbonneau.
When Tess Barton, a hardscrabble farm girl, saves the life of a man attacked by a panther, she and he little realize how fated this encounter will prove. Ryder Cole, the man she saved, moves on, pursuing a medical career just as the United States seems destined for war. Intrepid Tess will move on, too, when she learns that her widower father sells her in matrimony to an old, brutish shopkeeper. A wise crone cuts Tess’s hair and garbs her in men’s attire. Reborn as Tom Boyde, who will soon, strangely, meet up with Ryder and become one of his “men,” conscripted into Lincoln’s armies. Tess/Tom shows promise as a medical assistant with some undeniable cooking skills, and together with two other conscripts, they make the team in the Union’s army hospital units.
Things change again for Tess when she and the others visit a brothel in Washington, DC.
The madam spies a young woman in Tess/Tom right away. She dresses and perfumes Tess and sends her to Ryder. As for Ryder, he’s not stopped fantasizing about the huntress “Diana,” who saved him from the panther. As this strange link develops, Tom helps Ryder write to his “sister” Tess since Ryder has feelings – for Tom – that can only be assuaged by the hope of meeting the young man’s female twin someday. Meanwhile, their sexual affair blooms. Diana/Tess will meet Ryder only in darkness, though, and Tom/Tess serves mysteriously as their go-between. When the war ends, Ryder, assuming Tom to have been killed, feels compelled to seek out Tess, who has meanwhile met the Underground Railroad founder, Harriet Tubman, and has more than one surprise for her former lover and comrade-in-arms.
Seven Aprils feels a lot like the mistaken identities and disguises found in a romping romantic Shakespeare comedy.
The plot, undeniably complicated, appears in seven phases – beginning in 1860 with Tess and Ryder’s first encounter and concluding in 1866. When done with subterfuge, the two can finally see each other in complete honesty. The novel abounds with what is clearly the author’s deep commitment to historical fact. Many women disguised their physic to serve in the war. The scenes of army medical care, savage as it had to be under the harrowing circumstances, are founded on real accounts. And the background of noted battles and locations is drawn from the annals of recorded history.
If the tale seems a bit too fanciful, how could Ryder not see that Tom was a female at some point in their mixing? Held together by the reader’s own wish to have it so, readers have a chance to sit back and enjoy the show. So long as Tess/Tom can sustain her/his deception, there will be a gripping war chronicle and a sensual love story on the boil. And in the end, Charbonneau deftly ties up all the threads, leaving an opening (this being Book 1) for more such dramas to play out in the future. Seven Aprils took home the CIBA Laramie Grand Prize for the Best Western Romance novel in 2019.
