Powerful, painful, a story of survival.🌳 Adair endures the American Civil War in the Ozarks, and this is the story of how she makes it through. Paulette Jiles writes with poetic grace. That doesn’t mean she shies away from describing warfare, suffering, wounds, or death. It just means she carries you through it all, leaving you stronger on the other side, wishing there was just one more chapter to read.[I’ve read four of Jiles’s novels now, and she’s a favorite. In creative writing sessions, I ...

3.5➗➗➗I’m torn, and maybe a bit of an outlier, on this one. I find American Civil War history, and historical fiction based on that period, totally gripping, and "Enemy Women: A Novel of the Civil War" by Paulette Jiles had both elements woven in. But I kept wishing it would commit to being one or the other. I also listened to parts of the audiobook and wasn’t a fan of the narrator's take on the main character Adair's voice – the rhythm often felt rushed and anxious. Although, to be fair, consid...

The saying "War is hell" is a cliche for a reason; it's undeniably true. War profoundly impacts combatants and, in different yet equally powerful ways, civilians. In *Enemy Women: A Novel of the Civil War*, Paulette Jiles tells the story of the Civil War in the Ozarks of southeastern Missouri. She primarily tells her tale through the eyes of Adair Colley, an 18-year-old whose family is torn apart by the conflict. Much changes in the whole country during this war, and the change in Adair's life i...

Paulette Jiles' *Enemy Women: A Novel of the Civil War* is a stunning work of historical fiction, expertly blended with excerpts from letters, newspapers, and other documents, a testament to impeccable research. I was truly enlightened about a lesser-known facet of the Civil War – the violence and death wreaked by a Union militia in Missouri. It's a really great Civil War book. Jiles crafts a beautiful story, bringing the time and place to life through the eyes of a young girl who fiercely love...

“So it was in the third year of the Civil War in the Ozark mountains of southeastern Missouri, when Virginia creeper and poison ivy wrapped scarlet, smoky scarves around the throats of trees, and there was hardly anybody left in the country but the women and the children.”I’ve always been drawn to war stories. They seem to reveal with such candor both the best and worst of humanity. It isn’t the blood and loss of limbs and lives that attract me. Rather, it’s the people that seduce me to read abo...

The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who didn't know when to quit fighting. Like the Wild Geese of Ireland, they were used and spent like coins by one army after another. The Civil War was a bloody and costly affair for the men who fought it, and a source of despair for most American families, who lost their fathers, brothers, and sons. But there's another side to the war, and that's its effect on the women who were left to fend for themselves in a world that was unkind to single ...

Missouri, 1864. The Civil War tears the state apart, loyalties split between the Union and the Confederates. Paulette Jiles vividly recreates this tumultuous period in her novel, *Enemy Women: A Novel of the Civil War*. "We lived without telegraph lines. They are the things that carry evil gossip without your ever being able to see the gossiper and identify them and take your revenge. They speak unseen somewhere afar off. This spy voice is now ticking all over the Ozarks and ordering the taking...

Paulette Jiles has been a favorite author ever since I devoured **News of the World** years ago. Next, I read **Simon the Fiddler** and wasn't quite as thrilled, and I started to worry that my love for Jiles might be a one-hit wonder. But now, after finally reading her debut novel from back in 2002, **Enemy Women: A Novel of the Civil War** has cemented Paulette Jiles' status as a top author for me! If you're looking for compelling **historical fiction book reviews**, look no further. *The train...

Reading Road Trip 2020Current location: Missouri. . . she had thought of herself as a person who wonderful things would happen to because she was uncommon and marked apart. That a clear light burned inside of her that nothing could extinguish and it would always illuminate her way. That then before the war she had held this light between her hands. . . and that no wind would ever put it out.. A friend of mine, who is perpetually searching for signs of the Apocalypse, declared to me last week, “...

"I myself have asked old women for what they knew, and the old women at that time remembered things from old women they had known and so on until the beginning of the world. What they knew didn't always please me." And what they knew, was and is, bold, in your face, cold and cutting truth. Enemy Women: A Novel of the Civil War is a travelogue so to speak of the deep-set footprints of Adair Colley. The Colley family owned a clapboard home and barn in southeastern Missouri during the Civil War. ...