Engrossing and complex, this will have readers riveted. Based on historical events, Black Cloud Rising aims to unearth the lost stories of the Black soldiers that fought in the Civil War and present these. Etheridge is made a fascinating figure, well suited to serve as the focal point for Faladé’s exploration of the complexities of Etheridge and his comrades’s rapid shift from powerlessness to armed military duty.

Those recollections alternate with taut combat sequences as the unit struggles to pacify the area. As the brigade prepares for military action in hostile terrain, Etheridge flashes back to his past and to his time with Fanny Aydlett, the love interest he left behind to join the fight.

That upbringing left him with some ambivalence after he was freed having enlisted in the Union Army “to help destroy” the Confederacy and its dehumanizing culture, Etheridge still retains some fond memories of the time before his liberation. Ive never before encountered a novel to plunge me into the heart of the. In Black Cloud Rising, David Wright Falad introduces a true and fascinating historical figure in Sergeant Richard Etheridge. The brigade’s efforts to hunt down Confederate guerrillas in North Carolina in the fall of 1863 are conveyed by Richard Etheridge, a historical figure who was born into slavery on Roanoke Island and fathered by his master, and whose white half-sister taught him to read and write. As the war still rages, a Black Union Brigade is formed of recently freed slaves. Etheridge until the Civil War and emancipation ended his physical oppression. Born in 1842 along the shores of North Carolina's Roanoke Island, Etheridge was raised as the property of John B. The story of the African Brigade, a unit of Black freedmen who fought for the Union during the Civil War, gets its due in this superior adult debut from Faladé (after the YA novel Away Running). In Black Cloud Rising, David Wright Falad introduces a true and fascinating historical figure in Sergeant Richard Etheridge.

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