Orie’s Story takes the reader back to the Civil War through the eyes of a son of CSA Army Surgeons. The novel was inspired by her son’s memoir on the 75th Anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Born on a war-stricken tobacco plantation in February of 1865, William Luther Andrews, in the last two years of his life, penned a memoir of his mother, Dr. Orianna Russell Moon Andrews. She was the first female medical doctor in Virginia to have graduated from an accredited medical school. Included in the novel are Andrews' own memories, those of his kin, the author’s historical research and the philosophical attitude of Andrews seventy-five years after the war. Less worldly than his mother, who was educated in schools in the north and traveled extensively abroad, Andrews, a graduate of the University of Virginia, grew up hearing stories of the war by men who were there, and witnessed the economic devastation of the South which persisted throughout his lifetime. He was also nephew of Lottie Moon, the great Baptist missionary, who devoted forty years of her life to her beloved Chinese people in China from 1872 to 1912.
"Orie, calm and effective on the outside, was numb beneath the surface. Unwilling to depart from a soldier's bedside at crucial moments, she went too long without sleep, and when she did close her eyes, the nightmare of the cries of suffering pulled her back awake. Without time to eat or the appetite for it, she fainted in a corridor." Narrative describing Dr. Orie Moon at Charlottesville General Hospital after the Battle of First Manassas.