As Best We Could

By Jean Marie McLain

The story begins...

Just before Christmas, 1861, James "Jamie" McNeil, a young recruit in Captain Buckham's Sharpshooter Company at Delhi, New York, writes a letter of apology to pretty Mary Edwards. Mary had tumbled off her horse, and Jamie hopes she will forgive him for causing the accident. Mary, a spirited young woman from a farm near Meredith Square, replies pertly that she cannot accept his apology for, she admits, the mishap was entirely the fault of her own Willful Nature. She had been scandalously riding astride, and in scrambling to adjust herself properly sidesaddle, had lost her balance and fallen. "As Grandmother would say, I am a foolish girl who got what was coming to me," she tells him. Jamie gallantly replies that she should not believe she deserved what she got, and that her fall was really very graceful.

So begins a correspondence that is to last through nearly four years of war and suffering, and will blossom into a love that will sustain each of them in their most trying days.

You will fall in love with Mary and Jamie as they slowly discover each other and a love that will last a lifetime.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971856222
• ISBN13: 9780971856226
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: 1st World Library Incorporated
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

When Love Truly Conquered

This is an historical novel placed during the Civil War. Based on a series of letters between James McNeil, who rises through the ranks of the 101st New York Volunteers and loved ones at home, Ms. McLain has brought to life an amazing triumph of the 19th Century--the bonding of people across space and time, that transcended the meager technology of the period. It is touching, real, and poignant as 3,000 men die each week across a 200 week war....Why read it? Today, we are again involved in a War that will define our national identity, and the personal identity of Americans from coast to coast. In 1865, the United States was on the verge of fulfilling the concept of its Manifest Destiny to unite a land from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Are we fulfilling a manifest destiny now? Are we defending our nation from enemies foreign and domestic, as sworn by our President, the Commander in Chief, the same oath sworn to by Abraham Lincoln, and the members of our Armed Forces. Does that oath EVER terminate.Today, the battle came only once to our soil, some 3,000 died one time. Compare this to the Civil War. Today, cellphones and e-mails bring the front closer to home, however, than the stone walls at Fredericksburg or Gettysburg could ever come to New York. And yet, in the words conceived by the authoress McLain, they are close, perhaps closer.You don't have to be particularly interested in the Civil War per se to find this first novel intriguing, moving, and remarkable. I was fortunate to purchase this book from the author at a meeting of the Austin Civil War Roundtable--which one might think of as unfriendly turf. However, even the many Texans in this group recognize the universality of the feelings, images, stories, and effect on families of WAR. War is constant globally--somewhere, all the time. Ms. McLain's work of devotion to the study of the human dimension is a fine offering.Highly recommended!!

Wonderful Book

Jean Marie McLain's book As Best We Could is a wonderful story and I highly recommend it. One of the best books I have read in the past couple of years. Jean Marie became interested in the lives of the young men from her home area of New York who served in the Union army during the Civil War, so she did a lot of research and this book is their tale.Now most of us are not enamored of war so maybe we wonder why we might be interested in As Best We Could. Well, although the book happens during that stressful period, the story is a very moving, romantic, enthralling historical fiction of the relationship between a young man, Jamie McNeil, and a girl he met the day before he entered the army, Mary Edwards. The device Jean Marie uses to carry on the story is the letters they write back and forth to each other. From the first letter in which Jamie apologizes to Mary for startling her horse and causing her to fall off, to her accounts of her life as a single young woman in Delaware County, New York, to his descriptions of learning how to be a soldier, and then his very moving cries for contact with the world of peace as he experiences the horrors of war and his depressions from it, this book of letters was very hard for me to put down.If you like social history then you will really like the detail that Jean Marie put into the book. I learned more specifics about how it was to live back then, and because she wraps all this interesting information around Mary's growing feelings for her correspondent, and her relationships with her nuclear family, the text is an integrated, real story that creates a wonderful level of fascination.Jean Marie captured all of these ideas from serious research about the 101st New York Volunteers regiment. She read hundreds of letters both from these men and from their families to develop an understanding of their lives and their feelings about what they were going through. So this is a book as much about the women and families left behind as it is of the soldiers who were in the service.I really cannot speak enough about it, I loved it and frequently was moved by it. It was one of those rare books that you don't want to end...you know, the kind of story that when you see you are halfway through, your thought is, "darn, just 250 pages more." My hat is off to Jean Marie, a gifted author.