RaveThe News & RecordZacharias...is a masterly writer who obviously has done a great deal of research. She brings the Manitou’s voyage to vivid life with rich and convincing detail, in wonderfully wrought language that is almost poetic. She knows about lake ice, shipwrecks, legends and wintry storms. She knows and shows us what the staterooms and cargo areas look like, what the shipboard food is like and what the various jobs were aboard a railroad ferry. And yet, neither the breadth and depth of her knowledge nor the obvious care Zacharias takes with her prose overwhelms Fern’s story, a story that will grip your imagination and touch your heart ... This is a wise book, written with uncommon care.
John Hart
RaveThe Greensboro News & RecordHart is a brilliant writer, and his descriptions of the Hush — the fictitious Raven County is somewhere in the swampy and wildlife-rich lands of eastern North Carolina — are powerfully evocative.Powerful too are his glimpses into the past, into the very real evils of slavery and what really transpired between Johnny’s ancestors and the Freemantles. The new literary territory Hart ventures into in The Hush is the supernatural. There are things that happen in the Hush, in the past and today, that will require some serious suspension of disbelief on the part of Hart’s more literally minded readers. But everything — the legal machinations, wild nature, tangled history, mystery, even the magical and mystical forces — works together to create a story that grips the reader and lingers in the imagination.
