Sandcastles, Tall Ships and Vanities

Book excerpt: Sandcastles, Tall Ships, and Vanities is a fictional family love story intermingled with factual American and British history. Amanda Worsham is born during the War of 1812, in Charleston, South Carolina, to a wealthy British family involved with sailing vessels and worldwide shipping. "Sandcastles" is analogous to the ill-fated Southern plantation system, in that it exists when slavery exists, and is destined to vanish when slavery ends-just as the proverbial sandcastle disappears before the oncoming tide. "Tall Ships" alludes to the family's shipping business utilizing "windjammers," or beautiful tall sailing vessels for global sea trade. "Vanities" are whimsical yet powerful emotions. And to relegate another to slavery is vanity in its extreme (a self-evident truth). And unabashedly, it is a Christian, pro-life, anti-prostitution, and anti-slavery descriptive novel filled with human frailty and anguish. This story "is a handful," so to speak, dealing with family standards, love, sexuality, homosexuality, destructive prostitution (the so-called "white slavery" curse), plus the learning an altogether-fabulous wealth management stratagem. As she begins her marriage to longtime beau, Timothy Caldwell, Amanda assumes the Worsham family's New York-, Boston-, and Charleston-based overseas shipping business (an endeavor with tall ships and part of the fledgling clandestine military industrial complex). She witnesses the end of the Revolutionary War, the beginning of the American Civil War, and she helps shape a dynasty you'll long remember.