JUDAS FLOWERING

Searching our memory as well as our conscience, we can't find this any better (the publishers do) or very different from Miss Hodge's other period historical novels save for the bicentennial scene which threatens by now to garotte every patriotic impulse. But of course not someone like Mercy Phillips, newly arrived in America to find equality, only to see her father killed by a mob while she is rescued by Hart Purchis of an old Savannah family and plantation (he's enlightened--he has servants, not slaves). Hart is more distant than his cousin Francis, a Loyalist, but it is Hart whom she will love and assist as the phantom ""Reb Pamphleteer"" even if he has moments of doubting her. To be read, as it will be, by those ladies hoist by their own foulard.