Peter Brian

Snooks made two mistakes. The first was to leave the mines of Australia to search for gold in the wrong area of Canada. The second was to travel across the USA during a Civil War when all he wanted to do was get home to England. In a moment of panic he compounded the second by using the name of his old school friend Flashman instead of his own.Rubbing shoulders with the high and the mighty, Snooks manages to wear two uniforms, have two different ranks in two different armies; encounter women with bizarre notions of bedroom etiquette; kill more than one general and lose the greatest battle of the war three different ways. Journey with him as the likes of U.S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Longstreet, Halleck, Sherman and Wild Bill Hickok get in his way more often than not. His final error was to document his adventures and send them to his good friend Flashman, seeking to have them published. His manuscript vanished until being rediscovered at an estate sale in Durban, South Africa in 2006.Now his memoir resurfaces and the reader will wonder....... who was it who really did all these things? Is a vexing mystery explained?

Having survived many harrowing battles, including Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, Snooks (probably Charles F. Thursby) is befriended by John Surratt and his mother, Mary. He is only 12 miles from Washington D.C. and the British legation that will finally send him home. But someone in high office has a very different fate in store for Snooks.His story introduces many famous and not so famous figures of the American Civil War. The events described are real - although at times Snooks can be a bit weak on detail. From the stage of Ford's Theatre to Southern prisons, the strong and the mighty seem bound and determined to frustrate his efforts to get home. Perhaps it had something to do with his masquerade as a former school chum, Flashman. Seduction and betrayal are the least of Snooks' problems as he tries unwillingly to complete a mission in which he doesn't believe for a man he thinks is a worse villain than himself. He is a witness to history and to tragic events, for many of which he is partly to blame. Extensively footnoted, volume 2 of Snooks' Civil War adventures along with its companion (Snooks North and South) completes the cycle and answers the questions as to why a chap named Flashman never wrote his own memoir of the War. It's fiction that happens to be very close to the truth.

It's a quest - a search for meaning. It's a series of awful accidents that reveal truth. It's a manual warning of the simple dangers that confront children (and small animals) trying to make their way in the world. Parents should read this book with their children, making sure it is age-suitable for Squish and his friends make all the mistakes possible and find out what happens next.