In the middle years of her life, Céline Frémaux Garcia recollected in this memoir her Louisiana childhood and growth into maturity—a tumultuous personal period that was transformed by violence as it was dominated by fear. The result is a detailed and sensitive portrait of a child's world of awe and wonder, color, and strife, in which the Civil War and its aftermath form the backdrop for conflict and rivalry within her French middle-class immigrant family.
