Enemy Women

Adair Colley is sitting in a damp, dark prison cell.  Her family was ripped apart by the Civil War: her father beaten and taken away for being an enemy sympathizer, her brother fighting for one side, and Adair was separated from her sisters when another refugee family gave false testimony against her in return for favor from the soldiers.  Wrongly accused, she sits in jail with dozens of other women who are interrogated by the Union soldiers and treated as spies against the Army.  Will Adair survive the deplorable conditions to reunite with her family, or will they all be gone by the time she gets released?

Paulette Jiles is an award-winning poet and novelist, including Enemy Women which received the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2002.  This book focuses on the families left behind during the Civil War and their plight from lost homes and livelihoods to other hardships.  This book follows the little discussed lives of women imprisoned under the threat of death or torture as enemy combatants.  This is a story of survival, or friendships in unlikely places, and of betrayal.

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I give Enemy Women 4 out of 5 stars. To be completely transparent, I had to do research after reading this book to see how accurate this story really was.  As a Southerner, I heard a lot about things like the Battle of Chattanooga, Sherman’s March to the Sea, and the conditions of the prison camp at Andersonville.  You heard about women who defiantly kept home and farm running when their men were away at war or those who nursed the injured, but you did not hear about the plight of those arrested and convicted of spying on both sides.  There were minor challenges with the style of this writing – it felt like there was no unified direction throughout the book.  At first it was about hardships, then injustices, then betrayal, then romance along with mystery.  Just when you think you understand where the writer was going, she changed directions into a different theme.  I also found it hard to connect with several of the main characters including Adair – with the changing themes, changes in motivations abound.

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I would recommend this book to readers looking for a Civil War historical fiction told from a different perspective – so much of the literature around this era is either starring the major political and military men, or told from the Southern viewpoint.  I’d also recommend this book for readers looking for something western as this is set in Missouri when the area was just starting to be populated well.  Given the themes of violence and war, I’d recommend this novel to more mature readers over 16.

I chose Enemy Women for the United States reading challenge prompt “Missouri”.  This author was born and raised near where this book was set, so I’m sure this was inspired by the history learned in childhood.  I had a hard time finding a good book for this prompt.  My original intention was to read a Little House on the Prairie series book or Tom Sawyer, but jumped at the chance to read a book by an author I hadn’t heard of before.  What are you reading for this prompt? 

 

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What I’m Reading

• Current print book: Holiday Country, Inci Atrek
• Current audio book: We Are Called to Rise, Laura McBride
• Book I’m most looking forward to: Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow