Mountain Laurel

Mountain Laurel is one of Jude Deveraux's many historical romances, set in the American Civil War era and following the kind of strong willed heroine and dangerous hero pairing that her readers know her for. Deveraux made her career writing historical romance with strong heroines and a particular willingness to take on darker themes than some of her contemporaries in the genre. Her catalogue runs to dozens of novels across multiple connected series, and Mountain Laurel fits comfortably into the tradition she helped establish.

The story is set during the Civil War in the Appalachian Mountains and centers on the Taggert family of Warbrooke, the long running family Deveraux returned to across multiple novels. Maddie Worth is an opera singer of growing fame who needs to travel west across the dangerous wartime country to find her family. Captain Ring Montgomery is the Union officer assigned to escort her, and the two of them strike sparks immediately in the way that Deveraux's leads always do. The journey takes them through Confederate territory, into the kind of complicated moral terrain that frontier fiction set during the Civil War demands, and toward a romance that has to overcome the war itself before either of them can have any kind of normal life.

Deveraux writes the kind of historical romance that combines real period detail with the conventions of the genre. The Civil War setting is rendered with the basic accuracy her readers expect, with attention to the political and military situation in the contested mountain regions where loyalties were divided and where the war played out at small scale rather than in the large set piece battles of the eastern theater. The romance carries the emotional weight, with Maddie and Ring earning their relationship through the kinds of obstacles only war can manufacture.

For longtime Jude Deveraux fans who came to her through the Velvet series or the Taggert family books, Mountain Laurel is a comfortable entry into her wider catalogue. For readers who enjoy historical romance set during the American Civil War, this is a strong recommendation.