Carolina Gold by Dorothy Love

Carolina Gold by Dorothy Love is a book about the reconstruction era after the Civil War.  Feelings ran only hot and cold during this time in the south.  Charlotte Fraser had just return to the plantation, Fairhaven, after spending the end of the war caring for her ailing father in his last days of life.  Her father had run a Rice plantation and now upon his death was given the news that she needed to find the deed to the family holdings or risk losing it all.  Was it not enough that she was going to have to figure out how to run the rice operation in addition to the numerous repairs to the damaged home and surrounding buildings after the ravages of the war?  Carolina Gold was the name of the superior rice grown in the Lowcountry area of South Carolina where Charlotte grew up after her mother died.  The slaves were now freed and now she must figure out how to pay for repairs to the buildings and the fields as well as find willing honest workers all from her meager funds.  All around her men who had run their own rice plantations were going bankrupt. Charlotte though not a woman who finds attending social dances important as others around her is not used to working the rice fields alongside the field hands and her blistered hand soon show it.  Her dresses containing yards and yards of fabric have been replaced with more simple dresses suitable for working now. 

I liked this book though found it interesting what people of means call being poor.   Charlotte finds herself thought of as poor because she has to think about where every penny goes and it is necessary to work as a teacher for her neighbors children.  It is always interesting to read a novel based on real historical events.  Charlotte is based on a 19^th century female rice farmer who grew Carolina Gold in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.  This is the story of a young woman attempting to recreate at least a portion of the plantation that she grew up on and how she manages to learn to live in a new way on her own.

This book was provided by Booksneeze for this review.