at Wipf and Stock and Amazon
and iBooks (Mac/Apple)
Audiobooks now available too!
Caught between love of country and religious conviction during the American Civil War, the characters in the Scruples on the Line trilogy reveal a thought-provoking spectrum of experience. Are their actions heroic or traitorous, or somewhere in the middle? Throughout the volatile years from 1859 into 1865, the values of nation and faith become deeply intermeshed. Believing in the separation of church and state, the Anabaptists of this historical fiction trilogy struggle to find clarity of thought or consistency of practice. The five narrators come from Mennonite, Amish, and German Baptist church affiliations.
In three cumulative novels, Shadows, Book I; Loyalties, Book II; and Passages, Book III, the stories of “these people with scruples” living in the North and South are woven into a whole. The action of this series builds as it follows the chronology of the war’s impact on civilians. Military demands and drafts from armies on both sides cast a wide net of uncertainty, whether in the Shenandoah Valley, Chicago, or Iowa. For men who hold scruples against fighting, choices range from joining either army, to hiding, fleeing, paying a fee, or buying a substitute. Women and children face the trauma of being left to fend for themselves, as desperation seizes the armies of the Union and Confederacy.
Through fictionalized storytelling based on historical records including diaries, Scruples on the Line appeals to the imagination and makes the past accessible. History gives us a valuable way to think about the issues of our own time that echo the personal experiences of individuals, families, and churches in the nineteenth century.
