SOURCE: "Grandfather's Footsteps," in The Observer, January 17, 1993, p. 49.

[In the following excerpt, Pavey discusses Brady's focus on anger and faults her blending of fact and fiction in Theory of War.]

Soon after the end of the American Civil War a ragged soldier leads a white child into a Mid-West general store, sells him, then disappears. This startling act, occupying only two pages of Joan Brady's Theory of War, is the source of her whole novel, a story of damage inherited as well as of damage direct.

The meaning of being 'boughten' soon becomes clear to the boy. He climbs cheerfully into his master's farm wagon, but Alvah Stoke is not used to blithe, infantile chatter. Fearing he may have bought an idiot, Alvah tries a clout. The chatter stops. Thus Jonathan Carrick, aged four, is initiated into a childhood of slavery, and a lifetime of anger. Indeed it...