"During the spring and summer of 1863, various federal commanders instituted a policy of arresting women and teenage girls...who were suspected of aiding guerillas...they were confined...in Kansas City, Missouri." --- THE DEVIL KNOWS HOW TO RIDE: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders by Edward E. Leslie.
ENEMY WOMEN, by Paulette Jiles, is the story of one of these women. Adair Colley is a bold, strong-willed and strong-minded 18-year-old girl and a member of a family that has vowed neutrality in the War Between the States. An innocent. A bystander. A conscientious objector.
When Union soldiers destroy her home and take away her father, Adair becomes the sole caretaker of her two younger sisters. Our heroine is eventually arrested and falsely accused of enemy collaboration, then incarcerated in a women's prison in St. Louis with other like-charged women. Against her better judgment, she falls in love with a Union officer, Major William Neumann. Finally freed, but her spirit broken, Adair takes the perilous journey home, seeking to make the best of her ruined world. Adair's transformation from fearless to broken mimics the transformation of the Confederacy, but there is hope for her that love will prevail despite politics and war.
A lack of quotation marks in the dialogue and frequent excerpts from actual period correspondence can be somewhat distracting, especially in the early pages of ENEMY WOMEN, but not enough to detract from the richness of the text. And, to Jiles's credit, in a literary period when more renowned historical novelists are facing charges of blatant plagiarism, Jiles is methodical with her attributions. She moves with great ease between graphic, epic battle scenes and more intimate portrayals of Adair's relationships. As ambitious in scope as it is exact in detail, the text is pure poetry from start to finish. Jiles takes what could have been a dry factual story straight from the pages of a high school history text book and infuses it with beauty and emotion.
Paulette Jiles is a critically acclaimed poet and memoirist and the past winner of the Canadian Governor General Award, Canada's highest literary honor. ENEMY WOMEN, her first novel, is the product of a true historian's mind.
--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
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