An Important Novel   While it is true that The Woodsman's Daughter is a story of women struggling against the oppressions of late-19th/early 20th century South Georgia society--and a convincing one, making us feel the effects of that oppression in nearly every aspect of these women's lives--it is far more nuanced and complex a novel than such a description suggests. Rubio never reduces her characters to simple victims and oppressors. "Power, pure power," Dalia says, observing the beauty of her own body in the mirror. And it is. She has power over men's reputations, men's hearts, and men's ideas of themselves. With a near Flaubertian refusal to romanticize, Rubio allows her characters the ignorance that inevitably leads to such power's abuse. Male sensitivity is regarded as weakness, and male weakness is deplorable (Rubio makes female disgust palpable with her prose): it is a mistake, as Anais Nin once wrote, that nearly doomed our culture. The tragedy it brings upon these characters feels inevitable. Men--fathers, husbands, sons--who are too broad-spirited to fit the increasingly narrow ideals of what a man should be are cast into the shadows, where they remain like invisible presences, loving but mostly unloved, while the charlatans take the spotlight and abuse their position with increasingly cruelty. One feels especially for Monroe, who is both charlatan and man, and whose dilemma seems everyman's, as what drives his wife and children away from him seems not only the excesses of work or alcohol or sex, nor even the disease (blown up into all the proportions of Sin, as it is sexual) with which he afflicts them, but the audacity and drive from which these flaws result, and without which he too might very well have remained half-invisible shadow, unnoticed and unloved. The concluding reconciliation makes one wish that these people, women and men alike, had had more courage to empathize--a courage that this novel seeks to give. David W. Pitts Jr. - review for Amazon.com, September 20, 2005