"While everyone has heard of Uncle Tom's Cabin can name its famous author, few know the story of the distinguished family from which she came, the remarkable Beecher clan. In Harriet and Isabella, Patricia O'Brien has brought the Beecher family back to life. These passionate abolitionists, ardent preachers, and reformers are also touchingly fallible human beings, whose loves, feuds, and scandals provide O'Brien with more than a family drama, but rather the drama of an American era." -Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March-
"Patricia O'Brien has taken a familiar tale of scandal and self-destruction the trial of Henry Ward Beecher, with all its ramifications for post Civil War America and has brought it back to life for us in Harriet and Isabella. Beatifully told, in it we see afresh how a family, caught up in their times and celebrated as an example to the nation, began to unravel as the result of Beecher's transgressions and hs family's own conflicting loyalties. I found myself caught up in their times and their world through Ms. O'Brien's masterful storytelling." -Robert Hicks, author of Widow of the South-
