Wolf Pit

2001 Michael Shaara Award for Best Civil War Fiction

A powerful yet intimate novel of the Civil War on the home and battle fronts, The Wolf Pit offers a gripping portrait of two young Virginians forever altered by the violence and. uncertainty of national unrest.

Robin, a young Confederate soldier, battles from a valley of blood to a burning wilderness to labyrinthine trenches. He clings — despite the slaughter of friends and the shattering of illusions — to what gives him strength, to the beautiful and the uncanny: psalms, pictures of loved ones, and an old tale about a pair of mysterious, green-hued children found in a wolf pit. These he carries with him inside the very palisades of hell, the Elmira prison camp.

Agate, the daughter of a hired-out slave, embraces the forbidden teachings of her mistress, Miss Fanny. But the images she has fashioned for herself shatter when she deeply offends her owner, Young Master, who carries out a swift and cruel punishment. At the Williams Home Place, Agate learns 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 toils exacted during this chaotic period in U.S. history.

"Marly Youmans, author of the powerful novel Catherwood, has just produced a brilliant new novel called The Wolf Pit in which two characters who never meet play out their lives against the violence and sundering of the war between our states. The Wolf Pit is so completely envisioned, so nearly tactile in its detail, so near to what the thing itself must have been like, that it appears to have sprung, full-blown, from the author’s brow....The best scenes in the book are possibly the worst: the remarkable battle scenes, the slavemaster’s cruelty, a pair of wolves trapped in a pit. But the whole book is remarkable for its backsight and its controlled and terrible emotion. The Wolf Pit will rest easily on the shelf beside other great Civil War novels. It’s by Marly Youmans and published by Farrar Straus & Giroux." Erica Eisdorfer, WUNC Public Radio, Chapel Hill, NC

"The novel's many dramatic and traumatic events will keep the reader breathless, while the haunting lyrical language and the fierce intelligence behind it reminds us we are reading a writer and storyteller of the first order." Publishers Weekly

"This book shouldn’t work. It’s all wrong. It starts near the end, jumps to the middle and works its way back to the end again. It’s told in several voices, much of it in past tense. It’s a period piece, set during the Civil War, yet it also contains a book within a book, a fantasy story about two green children.

But it does work, and work well, because Youmans is a sound writer and plotter who can find the lyric in everyday observations and track the thread of the mystic in the lives of her characters.

Youmans makes her language sing. She is as adept at capturing the horror and carnage of war as the quiet and solemn beauty of the Shenandoah Valley in early autumn. Her two main characters, Robin and Agate, take over the tale early and stake out territory in the reader’s heart. Their voices are as real and immediate as a family member’s.

Youmans is not afraid to use her characters to make a point, to show how awful slavery really was, how dehumanizing war can be and how devastating the loss of a loved one is. The book is filled with symbols, not the least of which are the green children and the wolf pit, representing the eternal mystery of self identity and the harsh reality of physical existence. Despite the terrible things they endure, Youmans’ characters retain a rich spiritual life, a mystic connection with the past and future that sustains them.

The Wolf Pit can be read on many levels. It is a layered story full of subplots and subtle meanings. More than a war tale, more than a historical novel, Youmans’ book is a morality tale with a timeless relevance. Greg Langley, the Advocate Online

Marly Youmans recently moved from the Carolinas to Cooperstown, New York, where she lives with her husband and three children. Her previous books are Catherwood (FSG, 1996) and Little Jordon.