powerful, painful, a struggling through story 🌳 Adair survives the American Civil War in the Ozarks and this story is about how she survives it. Jiles is poetry in motion with her prose. Which doesn’t mean she can’t describe warfare or suffering or wounds or death. Just that she can carry you along through everything, and bring you out more and not less on the other side, and wishing there were just one more chapter to read.[I’ve read 4 of her novels now and she is a fav. In creative writing se...

3.5➗➗➗I'm a bit divided as well as a bit of an outlier on this one. I find American Civil War history and historical fiction based on the period compelling and this book was both in the way it was structured. But I kept wishing it was one or the other. I also listened to parts of it and did not care for the narrator's interpretation of main character Adair's voice cadence, often rushed and nervous sounding, although, considering what was going on in her life, perhaps realistic in those circumsta...

"War is hell" is a cliche for a reason; it's so very true. War definitely impacts the combatant and in different and equally powerful ways impacts the civilians. In Enemy Women Jiles tells the story of the Civil War in the Ozarks of the southeastern corner of Missouri. She tells her tale mostly through the story of Adair Colley, an 18 year old whose family is torn apart by the war. Much changes in the whole country during this war, and the change in Adair's life is the carnage in microcosm."On t...

This is a stunning work of historical fiction blended with fact by excerpts from letters, newspapers, and other documents, reflecting impeccable research. I was enlightened about a facet of the Civil War - a Union militia wreaking violence and death in Missouri.There is beautiful story telling bringing to life the time and place with a young girl who loves her family and her horse named Whiskey, as she falls in love with a Union Soldier. (I did, too.)There is joy in meeting a character like Adai...

“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 is not the blood and loss of limbs and lives that attract me. Rather, it’s the people that seduce me to read ab...

The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not 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 to the men who fought it, and a source of despair for most of our nation's families, who lost their fathers, brothers and sons, but there is another side to the war, and that is its effect on the women who were left to fend for themselves in a world that was unkind to ...

Missouri, 1864. The Civil War is raging. Missouri is divided in loyalty between the Union and the Confederates. This is the historical period that the author brings to life in this book.“ 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 of women to prison...”The focus o...

Paulette Jiles has been a favorite author since I read News of the World several years ago. Next I read Simon the Fiddler and was not as excited and hoped that my love for Jiles was not going to be a one hit wonder. Now, after finishing her debut novel which she wrote back in 2002, Enemy Women has put Paulette Jiles back in her status of favorite!! The trained and disciplined Union troops had long ago been sent to the battlefields of the East, to Virginia and Tennessee, while the hastily recruit...

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 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. A fiery torch in the hands of ...