I enjoyed this book quite a lot. It was easy to read and follow, so I often read more than I told myself I would before bed. These Hallowed Halls is well worthwhile. Recommended.

The novel, based on the true history of Sewanee, The University of the South, centers on its founding in rural Tennessee around the time of the American Civil War. The setting allows for a great deal of drama of all sorts—personal, political, racial, economic—as the large cast of characters work to overcome the turmoil of the war and emancipation, working in new and uncertain circumstances, hoping to lay the foundations for a future—which they all understand differently. Will the university survive? If so, will it become a bastion of the supremacist South? Will it be a place of meeting for young men of the North and South? A military school or a seminary? A place of hope and community for freedmen, or merely another extension of racist oppression? And who will provide all those young boys—and oldboys—with whiskey?

I found it fascinating to read the major events in the plot from the different points of view of each character—a Bishop, a moonshiner, former slaves, children of war-ruined planters, for example—and see how differences in class, culture, race, and sex shape how they understand and live out their lives. Which is not to say that the characters only represent various parts of the post-Civil-War South; they are their own people, complicated within themselves and in their relationships and histories. Most are characters you can sympathize with; a few, you can understand—but still dislike.