Tribulation Jones leaves home and joins with a band of rough neck southerners that are off to fight in the American Civil War. Tribulation goes along in fear of the bleak future the group paints for the south if they don’t all stand up and fight. Tribulation, not fully understanding what he’s getting into and why he’s even doing it, is drawn in by the comradery. But the war takes its toll on him, the South, and the North. Through the horrible fighting, witnessing his men die horrible deaths, and all the trials and miseries of war he comes to understand what he’s fighting for and questions if it’s worth all the suffering that he’s endured. But all the death and strife and brooding reflection is only a prelude to a tangled story of magic, conjuring and the afterlife.

Tribulations War is a remarkable story with some of the best battlefield descriptions I’ve read in a long time; covering all the senses; touch, hearing, smell, and sight. “Flying metal shards slammed into them, hissed like snakes around their heads. Yankee cannons stood on the crest and a rain of canister burst at their mouths. Men fell, ripped open, blinded, spewing blood. Someone shouted “Wheel right–File–Goddamn enfilade -” and the voice turned to a howl. Tribulation peered through acrid clouds, aiming at gunners, the sergeant there with his hand on the lanyard.” Author Kyri Freeman writes some of the most elegantly incisive descriptions that I’ve read. The book has a spectacular ability to deliver quick pacing with a deeply detailed story world and characters. The character dialogue, while not deeply engaging, was well fitted to each character. They each had their own mannerisms and again was all done with superb ease. The story takes place during the American Civil War and, I’m no history expert, but the battles, places, dates, weapons, and speech were all believable. The story covers a lot of the pivotal times in the Civil War, with one in particular being a central point of the novel; the death of General Stonewall Jackson. I won’t give away the intriguing twists and turns that follow, but I will say that they are engrossing and engaging and all told with a deft handling of language and pacing that is rare for many writers. The book is broken up into two sections. Book one covers the Civil War and Tribulations life through it and can be considered a Civil War era fiction novel. While book two, in stark contrast, is an exquisitely bleak look at the dark side of magic, conjurations, necromancy, and potions. Ten years after the war Tribulation is now trying to make his way in post-Civil War America while he suffers from post-traumatic stress. He wanders for several years and through many jobs before he finds himself at the Woodman’s hovel where he was first cursed early on in the book. He’s taken on as an apprentice by the Woodsman and is taught some conjurations and potions and other magical things that he learns through bitter trial and error and force on the Woodman’s part. Tribulations War is an exceptional book with a story that is deftly executed with superb writing, spot on pacing and deep character development. ( )

Tribulation Jones leaves home and joins with a band of rough neck southerners that are off to fight in the American Civil War. Tribulation goes along in fear of the bleak future the group paints for the south if they don’t all stand up and fight. Tribulation, not fully understanding what he’s getting into and why he’s even doing it, is drawn in by the comradery. But the war takes its toll on him, the South, and the North. Through the horrible fighting, witnessing his men die horrible deaths, and all the trials and miseries of war he comes to understand what he’s fighting for and questions if it’s worth all the suffering that he’s endured. But all the death and strife and brooding reflection is only a prelude to a tangled story of magic, conjuring and the afterlife.

Tribulations War is a remarkable story with some of the best battlefield descriptions I’ve read in a long time; covering all the senses; touch, hearing, smell, and sight. “Flying metal shards slammed into them, hissed like snakes around their heads. Yankee cannons stood on the crest and a rain of canister burst at their mouths. Men fell, ripped open, blinded, spewing blood. Someone shouted “Wheel right–File–Goddamn enfilade -” and the voice turned to a howl. Tribulation peered through acrid clouds, aiming at gunners, the sergeant there with his hand on the lanyard.” Author Kyri Freeman writes some of the most elegantly incisive descriptions that I’ve read. The book has a spectacular ability to deliver quick pacing with a deeply detailed story world and characters. The character dialogue, while not deeply engaging, was well fitted to each character. They each had their own mannerisms and again was all done with superb ease. The story takes place during the American Civil War and, I’m no history expert, but the battles, places, dates, weapons, and speech were all believable. The story covers a lot of the pivotal times in the Civil War, with one in particular being a central point of the novel; the death of General Stonewall Jackson. I won’t give away the intriguing twists and turns that follow, but I will say that they are engrossing and engaging and all told with a deft handling of language and pacing that is rare for many writers. The book is broken up into two sections. Book one covers the Civil War and Tribulations life through it and can be considered a Civil War era fiction novel. While book two, in stark contrast, is an exquisitely bleak look at the dark side of magic, conjurations, necromancy, and potions. Ten years after the war Tribulation is now trying to make his way in post-Civil War America while he suffers from post-traumatic stress. He wanders for several years and through many jobs before he finds himself at the Woodman’s hovel where he was first cursed early on in the book. He’s taken on as an apprentice by the Woodsman and is taught some conjurations and potions and other magical things that he learns through bitter trial and error and force on the Woodman’s part. Tribulations War is an exceptional book with a story that is deftly executed with superb writing, spot on pacing and deep character development. ( )

Genre mash-ups are all the rage, but since writing an effective one takes considerably more talent than a straightforward novel in any particular genre, I wouldn't recommend it to any but a highly skilled and practiced writer. Kyri Freeman's Tribulation's War: A Civil War Ghost Story would be a reasonable Exhibit A in a brief against mash-ups. The Civil War side of the book is pretty damn good; the ghost story side, woeful.

Freeman is abundantly talented, but her particular combination of pluses and minuses may prove difficult to utilize in a successful novel. Her great strength is in descriptive, rhythmic prose that makes you feel the physical and atmospheric realities of place:

"Blue shadows haunted the ground under oaks and chestnut trees, and in cold hollows snow still lay, ice-hard and white as bone. Tribulation Jones paused to listen to the Blue Ridge, running water and wind in branches, a hawk's scream high up in the gray sky; wiped cold mist from his face with a ragged sleeve."

That is the opening paragraph, and except for the overly obvious, symbolic naming of the protagonist, a very promising one: you are immediately THERE, feeling that cold, hearing that hawk. The prose continues at that high level of quality throughout the book and is a consistent pleasure.

The story gets off to a (too) fast start as Tribulation encounters a group of friends joining up with the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War, and throws his lot in with them on about five minutes' acquaintance. This did not seem quite credible, but Freeman sweeps you along into the thick of action so quickly that I was willing to suspend disbelief. Vivid action it is, too, on par with the best descriptions of Civil War battles that I have read anywhere.

What isn't quite so vivid are the personalities - but this works, in a way. Tribulation's War has a slightly oneiric flavor right from the start, and the shadowy, fading-in-and-out parade of soldiers fits in with that. We learn their names but little enough about them; they are certainly not given the kind of full-blown introductions one typically finds in a realist novel. Freeman has a trick of withholding or miscounting how many men are involved in a given scene, and then one speaks up and you think, "Wait a second - I didn't know he was there."

The lack of flair for characterization and for writing dialogue that reveals personality memorably could be a handicap for Freeman in writing other novels, and not one easily overcome, either.

There are hints of the supernatural in Book One of Tribulation's War, which occupies about 2/3 of the whole text, but because they are mostly just hints, they sustain the waking-dream tone without getting in the way of what is shaping up as a superior novel of the Civil War.

But then the war ends (with almost all the men we have been introduced to lying dead), the action shifts forward 10 years, and after a failed marriage and with a PTSD-fueled inability to let the war go, Tribulation finds himself pulled back to the home of the "Old Woodman," who figured in a brief episode in Book One. We find out that the Old Woodman is a 200-year-old conjure-man who has long had plans for Tribulation, and Book Two of Tribulation's War focuses entirely on Trib's apprenticeship in magic and his attempts to ward off his doppelganger "The Fetch."

Verily, my heart sank within me. The novel hurtles off the rails at this point, down a slope and into a wooded gully from which no survivors shall emerge, except perhaps the battered reader.

Honestly, the 75-page Book Two ranks as one of the most tedious pieces of reading I have suffered in a long time. Because I enjoyed Book One well enough, I felt more keenly disappointed than I would have if the whole novel had been dismissable.

Would I read another book of Freeman's? Maybe - but I'd read the description carefully before I did. She has got a genuine writerly gift, with some glaring deficits. The best passages in the Civil War section of Tribulation's War are superbly done, but unfortunately the overall scheme of the book is badly misconceived. Freeman is a fine realist writer who should beat off any temptations to write speculative fiction with a sturdy pole - but looking at Amazon, I see that her two other published novels are installments in a fantasy trilogy.

Stop the insanity! ( )