Katie and Mayme have grown up into young women. Mayme’s beloved Jeremiah has gone north for work. Katie and Mayme travel north to Philadelphia to visit their aunt. But when the train gets there, only one of them is on board.  

South at Rosewood, their beloved family home, tension is high as the KKK are making threats against their cotton crop; a crop that is desperately needed to keep Rosewood from being sold for back taxes. And threats are being made against Rosewood itself. Will the family have to make the difficult choice between saving themselves or their beloved Rosewood? 

MISS KATIE’S ROSEWOOD is the fourth book in the Carolina Cousins series. This reader read book three, Never Too Late, and loved it so expectations were high before even reading the very first page of MISS KATIE’S ROSEWOOD. Having read a previous book in the series made this book much more easy to understand, given the complex extended family made up of whites and half-blacks. Katie is the white cousin of Mayme, a half-black ex-slave whose father is the brother of Katie’s deceased mother.  

This book runs through an array of emotions. The reader worries over the fate of Mayme who disappears during the train ride to Philadelphia. She is forced to ride in the “blacks only” car at the end of the train and the car disappears before the train reaches its destination. The reader feels joy upon the romances between our young leading ladies and their heroes. Then we are back at worry and despair when Rosewood is threatened.  

Kudos to author Michael Phillips for portraying this tale so accurately. It is set in very tremulous times in the South after the Civil War when there were bands of white men who didn’t agree with freed black slaves being treated as equals as they are at Rosewood.  The characters in this book fairly jump out of the pages as they are penned so beautifully. This book is another awesome offer from Mr Philips. 

This reader missed the first two books in this series and will have to go back and read them. Lovers of the Carolina Cousins series will be saddened that this will most probably be the final installment as Mr. Philips gives us an Epilogue of remembering first person seen through Mayme’s eyes. This reader truly is.

© Love Romances, 2001-2007. All Rights Reserved