LEFT BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD: Characters in Search of a Novel What do they have in common? Some of these people have appeared in A Scratch with the Rebels and Beyond All Price. Others made cameo appearances in The Road to Frogmore. All of them are here because, even though their stories were fascinating in their own right, they did not fit into the novels where they first appeared. These are characters and events that were literally "left by the side of the road" as other historical novels took shape. These vignettes allow them to speak for themselves. Together they provide a multi-faceted glimpse into the stories behind the Civil War. Slaves abandoned by their owners when the Union Army invaded coastal South Carolina . . . Government officials charged with reorganizing captured territory . . . Army officers and the women who accompanied them . . . Free blacks determined to rescue their brothers and sisters from slavery . . . An opera singer with a penchant for pornography . . . Abolitionists with competing visions for the future of newly-freed slaves . . . A talented and sympathetic nurse who was once a runaway, a fugitive from justice, and a battered wife . . . Carolyn Schriber's novels have been praised as "the stuff of a great book ... storytelling yes, but also a subtle message that eats at you...and makes you go seek out more information ... and gives you something to talk about over dinner." (Joyce Faulkner, Past President of the Military Writers Society of America.)
About the Author: Carolyn Poling Schriber, received her PhD in History from the University of Colorado, where she studied medieval Europe and 19th-century America. She enjoyed a career as a tenured professor at Rhodes College, specializing in medieval history and publishing extensively on relationships between Anglo-Norman bishops and kings in the twelfth century. After she retired with Professor Emerita status, she turned her attention to her second love, the history of America's Civil War. Her first published works, A Scratch with the Rebels and Beyond All Price, are both been set in South Carolina during the northern occupation of the Low Country. A Scratch with the Rebels illuminates the depth and diversity of perspectives from ordinary soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Beyond All Price tells the story of Nellie Chase, who served as matron and nurse in the Roundhead Regiment from Pennsylvania. Nellie fought her own series of wars, against an abusive husband, against a vengeful Presbyterian minister, against nineteenth-century attitudes toward women who lacked the protection of family status, and ultimately, against a foe more lethal than war itself. In 2012, Dr. Schriber published The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese, which originated as a series of blog posts written by Dr. Schriber as she struggled to find her own way through what she calls the "thickets of self-publishing." The lessons she learned along the way helped her to win two separate book awards and to find herself listed among the top 100 Amazon best Sellers in Historical Fiction. Now she shared her writing secrets. But there was more to come. By the end of the year, Schriber had added another work of historical fiction. The Road to Frogmore is a biographical study of a woman who was instrumental in bringing education to the newly-emancipated slaves of South Carolina's Low Country. It is based entirely on fact but told in the form of a novel. Dr. Schriber now lives near Memphis with her husband and five loveable but opinionated cats. When she is not engaged in managing a non-profit charity connected with Lions Clubs International, she writes and dreams of further adventures in the Low Country between Charleston and Savannah.