Winds of Change, by Carole Eglash-Kosoff, is a whirlwind
novel of bi-racial frustration and love set against a cataclysmic period that
includes the Spanish-American War, the San Francisco earthquake, and World War
I. It is a continuation of her novel, When Stars Align, but is a great
stand-alone read as well.
Winds of Change deals with segregation and injustices
to Southern Black and Colored communities during the post Civil War
period. Although Black legislators were
elected and laws enforcing equality were passed, old attitudes persisted,
including increases in Ku Klux Klan membership. Minorities were mistreated and interracial mixing led to disastrous
consequences.
Josiah Rogers,
his aunt Amy, her daughter Bess, and cousin Stephen, are living in San
Francisco. Josiah’s ancestors, safe in
the belief that they were white, grew cotton, getting wealthy off the sweat of
their slaves. Amy passes away and Bess
discovers a letter, hidden among her things, asking to be buried under a
special magnolia tree at Moss Grove, the Louisiana cotton plantation where
she’d fallen in love. They comply,
providing them an opportunity to meet the people who meant so much during her
life and whom they’d only known as children.
Moss Grove
is now owned by the Finemans, a Jewish family, with two grown children, Rachel,
a dark haired beauty, and Stuart, who had always been attracted to Bess. Rachel and Josiah launch an explosive
physical relationship that ends in their elopement despite her parent’s
mistrust of Josiah. Mr. Fineman is
forced to reveal secrets about Stephen’s birth that doom the relationship
between him and Bess. Racial
relationships of the past return to haunt them all.
Winds of Change reflects on jazz, drugs, sex, war, and racism as vast numbers of Negroes leave the South, and the introduction of automobiles, airplanes, electric lights and movies whirl around everyone's lives.
I found Winds of
Change to be very adventurous as well as a wonderfully accurate historical
novel. This book is truly a
masterpiece. The language used is
exquisite, the characters well drawn and believable. Carole
Eglash-Kosoff kept me in suspense and involved me in the lives of the
characters by using highly developed visual imagery in her writing style. This book displays how families from
different cultures and values lived in the rural South, having diversities in people
not generally accepted.
Winds of Change
truly brings the terrors of the Spanish-American War, World War I and deathly
activities to light as one can virtually feel the characters' pain. But the beauty of the writer's language pulls
the reader on, no matter how horrific the circumstances became.
Carole Eglash-Kosoff makes it easy to understand and
appreciate the generations of not-so-long-ago. I loved reading her book, allowing myself to step back in time to
“savor” the home-cooked Southern meals and “hear” the heavily accented Southern
folks talking to one another throughout her excellent descriptions.
For educators, this book can certainly be used in your
classroom to teach students about diversity and differences among
cultures. It teaches children to accept
and respect cultures which are different from their own. One clearly will appreciate the research
which has gone into writing this book, and we thank the author for giving us all
a glimpse of past cultural diversity, in this beautifully written historical
novel.
