Prison Pit

A powerful, intimate look at the Civil War on the home and battle fronts, "The Wolf Pit" is Marly Youmans's third and most accomplished novel. In it Robin, a young Confederate soldier and witness to the horrors of war, clings to what gives him strength: family pictures, psalms, and an old legend about a pair of mysterious green children found in a wolf pit. Robin carries these inside the Elmira prison camp, the very embodiment of hell. Meanwhile, Agate, the mulatto daughter of a hired-out slave, embraces the forbidden teachings of her mistress, Miss Fanny, who teaches her to love books and to write. But the hope Agate has fashioned for her future disappears when her owner, Young Master, learns of her education. Agate comes to understand the meaning of her mother's cautionary tales as she struggles to survive loss and degradation and to pit knowledge and truth against evil. By turns eloquent and harrowing, "The Wolf Pit" explores the will to endure in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and the personal tolls exacted during this chaotic period in U.S. history.