In Dreams of Savannah by Roseanna M. White, Cordelia Owens is a pampered Southern belle who loves to dream and write stories. She also loves Phineas Dunn, a lifelong friend newly recruited to the Confederate Navy, and promises to wait for him forever.

When she learns Phineas has been lost at sea, she weaves heroic tales for his mother and sister to help them keep up hope.

When Phineas was shot and fell overboard, he thought he was done for. But somehow he washes up on an island near Cuba. He’s rescued by a person he never imagined existed: an educated free black man from England. He has no way to let his family or his commanding officer know what has happened to him. All he can do is try to get well as fast as possible and get home. But his injuries are severe.

As the weeks drag by, a distant cousin of Cordelia’s comes to Savannah, assigned to the Confederate regiment there. Her parents are impressed by his manners, standing, and wealth. They like Phineas well enough, but his family’s credentials just don’t compare. They put pressure on Cordelia to turn her attention to her cousin. But even if she had not promised Phin she would wait forever, she would not have her cousin. There’s a predatory gleam in his eyes when her parents aren’t around.

When Phineas finally returns, he is still suffering from his injury. Worse, he has fallen in his own estimation. He wanted to be the hero of Cordelia’s stories. He doesn’t feel worthy of her, but he still vies for her hand. Her parents keep pushing her toward her cousin.

Both Cordelia and Phineas are from good families who are known to be kind to their slaves. Phineas’ father was, in fact, planning to free his slaves until doing so became illegal in Georgia.

But different experiences and people begin to change their perspectives. The question now is what to do. Is it enough just to be good to one’s slaves? Could they be mocked, scorned, or even arrested if their views on slavery changed? And how could their views change without changing their actions as well?

At the beginning of this book, Cordelia came across to me as young and somewhat silly (one of her fears for Phineas was that he might be attacked by a giant squid. . . ). I’m not sure how old she was, something hard to go back and find in an audiobook. Also, the Southern belle vibe came across a little too thick, replete with “fiddale-faddle” and “fiddel-dee-dee” (making me wonder for the first time why “fiddle’ was in so many expressions then).

But after I settled into the story, I began to enjoy it more. Cordelia is immature at the beginning. But the circumstances of the story cause her to grow. Even her story-telling matures over time.

It would be hard to write a book of changing viewpoints towards slavery and black people set in the 1861 South without attributing to the characters twenty-first century sensibilities. But Roseanna avoided that and had beliefs change and grow in the context of what was going on at the time.

A couple of my favorite quotes:

She certainly shouldn’t be refused happiness because of your convoluted ideas about your precious blood making her better than her mother . . . Because let me just tell you . . . your blood doesn’t have that power. There’s only one Man’s blood in all of history that can make us better than we are—and your are not Him.

She didn’t need to be a heroine in some fantastic tale of derring-do. That wasn’t what the Lord had given her. No, He’d given her words. Words to live by. Words to create with. Words that maybe, just maybe, could change the world beyond her house as surely as they had changed the one within.

I listened to the audiobook nicely narrated by Sarah Zimmerman.

So far, I have loved every book of Roseanna’s that I have read, including this one.