The Coffin Quilt: The Feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys - Hardcover

Rinaldi, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0152020152 ISBN 13: 9780152020156

Publisher: Harcourt Childrens Books, 1999

Synopsis

Fanny McCoy's family has been caught up in a bitter, violent, and senseless feud with their neighbors, the Hatfields, and Fanny, the only one who sees the horror in what is happening, must find a way to escape the hate. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

ANN RINALDI is an award-winning author best known for bringing history vividly to life. A self-made writer and newspaper columnist for twenty-one years, Ms. Rinaldi attributes her interest in history to her son, who enlisted her to take part in historical reenactments up and down the East Coast. She lives with her husband in central New Jersey. Visit her online at www.annrinaldi.com.

Reviews

Grade 6-9-Based on the legendary feud between the West Virginia Hatfields and the Kentucky McCoys and narrated by the youngest McCoy, Fanny, this story recounts the escalating bitter feelings and violence between the families. Their feud, simmering since the 1870s, originated in a dispute over a hog, although changing social and economic factors exacerbated animosities. Here, the catalyst that sparks the greatest violence is Roseanna McCoy's liaison with handsome, faithless Johnse Hatfield. The unwed couple lives together for several months until Roseanna returns to her family. An unfinished coffin quilt, a fabric record of Hatfield family births and deaths, and her unborn baby are her only legacy of her stay. Although Rinaldi has kept close to the actual sequence of events of the feud, she has introduced elements of her own creation in her endeavor to explain the "why" of the story. Her interpretation through Fanny that Roseanna "sought destruction of herself. And she'd dragged so many of us with her" is difficult to accept. In addition, it is hard to understand why, in a story that is replete with documented historical violence, the author added gratuitous cruelty in portraying elder sister Alifair's relationship with Fanny as abusive. This violence is unnecessary for either character or plot development, and with such a genuinely brutal story, it seems over the top to include it.
Patricia B. McGee, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fanny McCoy, the protagonist and narrator of Rinaldi's (A Break with Charity; An Acquaintance with Darkness) tautly plotted historical novel about the infamous feuding families effectively portrays the clans' divided loyalties and cycle of violence. This colorful novel, an addition to the Great Episodes series, begins in 1889, when Fanny is 16, at a hanging, and flashes back to 1880 to describe the evolution of the quarrel Fanny claims would never have started "if not for my sister Roseanna. And I can say this, because I loved her best of all." Roseanna McCoy, "so purty that just being next to her is better than a piece of rock candy," ran off with Johnse Hatfield and ignited the tinder box of residual hatred still smoldering from "The War Amongst Us" (the Civil War). As Roseanna stitches the title quilt, she morbidly records the interwoven fates of the two families, and Fanny, watching her, gradually realizes that her sister courted destruction and "dragged so many of us with her." Through homespun language, folk remedies, superstition and a vivid picture of a vengeful religion (e.g., Mama McCoy constantly shifts the pebbles of those in her prayers between the saved and damned piles), Rinaldi skillfully paints the code of honor of Kentucky and West Virginia mountain families. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Young Fanny McCoy lives in the shadow of violence. Her late-1800s West Virginia^-Kentucky community is the hotbed of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud that has inflamed her family with fear and suspicion and set off killing rampages. When Fanny's older sister, Ro, elopes with Johnse Hatfield, the stage is set for escalating hatred and tragic results. The roots of the vitriolic conflict stem from the Civil War days, with insult upon injury following until the why of the conflict no longer seems to matter. "It's just in the McCoy blood to make right a wrong done to you and yourn," Tolbert McCoy muses to Fanny, and "making right" virtually consumes the family in the end. Strong characterizations fill the pages, as does a brooding sense of tragedy that hangs over the community, symbolized by the coffin quilt that Ro obsessively works on and the "Yeller Thing" animal vision that appears to Fanny every time evil is about to descend. Yet Fanny has a perspective and freshness that make her strongly appealing and rescue the book from sheer bleakness. Rinaldi remains a popular writer of young-adult historical fiction, and this novel beautifully evokes a time, a place, and one of the more peculiar sagas in American history. A followup note provides background about the feud. Anne O'Malley

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt Childrens Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0152020152
• ISBN 13: 9780152020156
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228