A White River by George Roland. PublishAmerica, 2004. $19.95 — 219 pp.

The Lost Boys of Sudan: An American Story of the Refugee Experience by Mark Bixler. University of Georgia Press, 2005. $24.95 — 261 pp.

In A White River, George Roland has given us a fast-paced look at several Western North Carolina families and their role in the Civil War. The subtitle to his novel — “Being a Partial Accounting of the Liner, Rush and Turpin Families of Western North Carolina, Their Free Negro Acquaintances as well as the 16th & 62nd North Carolina Infantry Regiments in the War Between the States” — may seem ambitious for a 200-page fiction, but Roland manages to cover both the main events of the war and the family history without doing damage to his tale.

Although Roland’s Civil War tale follows the adventures of several individuals, the dominant story is of Leander Liner, a young white landowner and soldier, and of Othello, a black man who, as it turns out, is Leander’s uncle (or half-uncle, if such a category exists). Both men grow up together, go off to the war, and suffer the various privations with which even novice Civil War buffs are familiar. Leander eventually meets the woman whom he will marry, and the book ends as did the war, with the survivors trying to carve out new lives for themselves.

A White River is well written and interesting in terms of the information presented. Descriptions of the relationships between whites and blacks in the South are particularly fine; we see racial harmony and racial hatred in human terms rather than in the stereotypes in which those relationships are often drawn. Roland does an excellent job of writing of the lives of independent blacks and of their interaction with their white neighbors. Roland also succeeds in blending the history of the time — the battles of the War, Jackson’s death, the surrender of Lee — with the conflicts faced by the novel’s characters.

Some aspects of the book will strike many readers as unrealistic or, at times, as silly. In Chapter 51, Roland has the Civil War ending in April 1864, instead of 1865; since he clearly knows better, we may interpret this missed date as an error in proofreading.

More importantly, however, are the scenes in the book regarding sex and love. At one point we are treated to the odd spectacle of a group of soldiers having a contest to see whose penis is longest. Did these guys never bathe in the river together? The scenes where Leander falls in love with Summer Will — she discusses in direct terms with a black friend Leander’s “hardness,” and on Leander’s return “Summer leapt onto him, locking her legs onto his torso” — will strike some readers as belonging to the 20th century rather than to the 19th. They simply don’t ring as true as the rest of the book.

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The University of Georgia Press has just published Mark Bixler’s The Lost Boys of Sudan: An American Story of the Refugee Experience. Bixler, a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a former reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal, follows the lives of four young men who escaped the horrors of the Sudanese civil war and, having left East African refugee camps, came to begin new lives in Atlanta.

Bixler tells us of the trials undergone by the Lost Boys — their families scattered, their mothers and fathers sometimes murdered, the long marches without food through the wilderness to escape capture themselves. Yet Bixler includes more than the agonies suffered by these four young men. He also tells us of their trials in their new country. None of them had ever operated a shower, a microwave, a DVD, or any of the other household machines that Americans use. They struggle to find work, to fit into a society totally alien to them, to learn to get past their fear of arrest and violent death. In addition to showing us the personal struggles of the lost boys, Bixler also shows us how their Christian faith buoyed them throughout their lives and how the strife in the Sudan is the direct result of the radical Islamic elements who dominate the government of that state.

Particularly compelling in Bixler’s account is the attempts by the Lost Boys to gain an education for themselves. We follow some of them as they attend high schools or colleges, study at Job Corps or prepare themselves for the GED. To read even of the smaller obstacles that these students had to overcome — to learn, for example, not only to read and speak English, but to learn idioms and slang, and even how decipher the written dialogue for a play — should inspire gratitude in students of all ages for their education.

The Lost Boys of Sudan is a wonderful tale of endurance, of American generosity, and of dreams.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)