The Copper Road

Loyalties

This book is about loyalties and men. It is about the horrors of war and a soldier’s loyalty to his fellow soldiers and his cause. It is also about a girl named Clara and her friendship with two men Shire her English friend fighting for the Union Army and her friend Tod fighting with the Confederate Army.

The book goes into detail with the war, Shire’s unit on the Union side and Tod’s unit on the Confederate side. The fellow soldiers of each, how Shire and Tod meet each other. There is more than that. The men bare their thoughts and their fears to each other.

When Shire’s life is spared by Tod and he is taken prisoner by Tod they become friends. When Shire is offered a pardon by a high ranking Confederate if he rescue’s Clara from a dangerous situation he asks for Tod to accompany him on the mission to save Clara and to bring back a load of copper from her copper mine to use in Confederate bullets. He did not know that Tod had met Clara on a Riverboat and that they had an affair.

The events that took place during that trip tell the rest of the story.

This was an interesting book telling much of the civil war history. What happened to the slaves when the war started. What happened to the plantations when the men all went to war and the slaves left.

This was a good book and I would recommend it.

Thanks to Richard Buxton, BooksGoSocial and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I received a free electronic copy of the ARC of this novel on July 20, 2020, from Netgalley, Richard Buxton, and BooksGoSocial. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. Richard Buxton writes a compelling story set in the south in the last year of the Civil War. We see the action from both sides through the spring and summer of 1864. The pace is tense, the mood electric, and though this is part of a series, The Copper Road: Beyond the Promise is complete in and of itself. I'm sure, however, that you, too, will have to run down a copy of Shire's Union, Book #1, once you get involved in the lives of Shire and Clara.

A Gripping Civil War Read

The author must have done deep research for this book because I felt as though I could smell the gunpowder and feel the numbness of the ordinary Soldier who had been at war for too long. This book is tightly focused in time, taking place in the early part of 1864. We get a sense of what is happening in the war on both sides, as we follow one man who is a part of the Union Army (Shire) and one who is a Confederate (Tod). We also get a sense of the importance of hot commodities during war—in this case, copper. The Confederate Army is willing to pardon a prisoner of war to secure copper for bullets from a woman's copper mine. Each of these three people has very different perspectives on what is happening during the war and what could happen after it. I loved that the author included some battle maps at the start of the book. I'm a very visual reader, so it helps to have aids like that. By the way, I hadn't read the first story before reading this one, and I had no trouble whatsoever understanding what was happening. I am certainly curious now, though, about that first story, so I will be checking it out. If you enjoy well-written stories about the Civil War, this one is well researched with great characters.

This is a very descriptive book, you can almost smell the smoke from all the gunfire. I thought this was a long book and it dragged on forever at times.
Historical fiction fans will enjoy this book
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the copy

Very well researched! Readers who enjoy Civil War novels will like be impressed with all the details about the war. Shire, a Union soldier and Tod, a Rebel become unlikely friends as saga continues.

The American Civil War was anything but civil. Americans fought Americans. The Blue fought the Gray. And sometimes they fought among themselves. Over 400,000 men were killed. Copper Road is the story of the 125th Ohio Union Regiment, and the men who fought under its flag.

There was respect and there was contempt. Officers were honored for good decisions or there was disdain for poor decisions. There were friendships. There were jealousies. There were soldiers who fought tenaciously, and soldiers who just wanted to go home. We meet all kinds. We are front and center in the smoke and the dust and the rain and the cold and the heat and the hunger and the thirst.

In the background, of course, there is a love story. And there are war profiteers. But, always, in the forefront, the war intrudes.

A well-researched novel of the Civil War and those who fought in it.

I read this EARC courtesy of the author. Pub date 07/26 /20

The Copper Road: Beyond the Promise, the second installment from the Shire's Union series, was a great read for me. I am hoping there will be a third book in the series. This one is getting five plus stars.

Richard Buxton who is not a citizen of the United States nor resides there gives us an extremely well researched novel set in the final months of the Civil war that engulfed the U.S. in the 1860s. A slight kinship is to the Stephen Crane "The Red Badge of Courage" which dealt with a young soldier finding the courage to go into combat. The difference in the books is that Mr. Buxton presents combat as a horror involving killing in large quantities with dead and maimed men spread out over what are just killing fields. There is nothing noble about the death depicted in his novel.
Shire is a young man that has followed Clara, a childhood friend of his, from England to the United States in order to care for her. Clara has married and left for America to be with her new husband, a man not exactly enamored by his prospective father-in-law and also Shire. Due to circumstances Shire finds himself a soldier fighting for the north in the Civil war raging when he arrives. At the same time Clara's new husband has been killed in the war placing his widow as head of property he owns in the state of Tennessee.
A third character: Tod, enters the picture as he is escaping from a Yankee prison of war train taking Confederate prisoners to incarceration. The novel tells the stories of the three principal characters as their lives interwind in the midst of the war. Tod and Shire somehow meet in the midst of combat, each fighting for a different army and immediately form a liking for each other which brings them together over the near future. Clara and Tod also meet when both are passengers on a steam boat and are drawn into a sexual encounter which has bearing later on.
Allowing for the literary license which depends on farfetched coincidences to occur at the proper times Mr. Buxton's book is an interesting read. It is not an all night draw due to several over long descriptions of different situations but is a novel that is a sufficiently interesting for the well done descriptions of actual military events of the war.

Very well researched story about the civil war. Nor sure what the issue was, but just couldn't get into the story. It just didn't interest me, but it was just me, not ant fault of the author.
4 stars

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher and author for an ARC of this book.The opinions expressed are my own.