“I’m a person who has spent a lifetime trying to craft language for maximum impact, and I can honestly say I was blown away by the writing in “March to the Sea.”

I can’t count the number of times I read a passage and thought, “Wow!” and immediately reread it. I reveled in the description of the wanton destruction of an upright piano, “its ivory keys lying like broken teeth on the floor” … the characterization of the Savannah River as “uncoiling from a resting position in Savannah, a huge, blue hydra-headed serpent” … as well as Carol’s introductory tip of the cap to her perpetually upbeat father who “carried gratefulness around like a lucky coin.”

But the novel offers far more than sparkling turns of phrase. Although the authors were clearly steeped in the events, customs and quirks of the era, they communicate them not with an overarching view from a century and a half away but from down on the ground, with immediacy, through the eyes of people, who, like warriors throughout the ages, experienced unpredictable blasts of fear, fatigue, pain, triumph, death and often-agonizing moral dilemmas.”

“One-hundred-and-sixty years removed, most stories about America’s bloodiest ordeal look back with a romanticism focused on the most important players: Lee, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and others. In March to The Sea, Robert Rudy and his daughter Carol have exposed one of the darkest pieces of the conflict and told their story through the eyes of the common Soldiers and civilians who experienced it. Despite what many fictionalized accounts might portray, many people during the war between the states had complex motivations and were not the right or wrong, good or bad, easily definable people we might think of today. March to The Sea is a modern, authentic telling of a violent portion of our history, told from the perspectives of the men and women who lived through its horror.”