Enemy Women

Good general idea of life in border states between North and South . To think that Americans could treat EACH OTHER so awful is not for the weak hearted. I pray we don't have another civil war.Randy Richardson, B.A. History.

This is my second endeavor by Paulette Jiles, the first being the very good ‘News of the World’. ‘Enemy Women’ was her first novel and as almost everyone knows, her books intentionally lack quotations and sometimes punctuation and sentence structure. Although much easier to tolerate, her last book still retains these faults in spite of numerous reader complaints about them. That tells me that Jiles is going to continue along this path. Too bad.Adair Colley is an interesting character, and I could get behind her determination to survive in a world gone crazy. A world where civilians are alternately mistreated (up to and including killed) by Union troops, then the CSA troops. Major William Neumann is also a survivor, but because of a different drive. Both of these protagonists see past the rough exterior of their worlds. For Adair, it is her resourcefulness to make use of odd things that come her way as she journeys toward home. Luck is stumbling across folks that are a help to her. Stumbling across her lost horse, Whiskey. Stumbling across Greasy John, and obtaining the planned path dangerous Union Militia territory. Some may think these coincidences are too convenient. Maybe they are, but she wouldn’t have survived without them. Through it all she can still appreciate and enjoy the beauty of her natural Missouri. For Neumann, it is the chaos and sacrifice that is war and to survive it, though not unscathed. He proves to be necessarily brutal when the antagonist pushes too far, threatening to stop his reuniting with the love of a woman.Jiles seems to be able to put the reader into a scene deftly, but she suffers from wordiness much too often which causes this reader to wonder from time to time, “What in the hell is she going on about?” It seems that the author loses her way now and then, and has gone off on a tangent. I also found the onslaught of colloquiums of the nineteenth century distractingly overdone. Camisette? What is that? Ankle-jacks? A tiny explanation would be helpful. What good is writing if your reader doesn’t know what you are saying? I also disliked the unrelated excerpts from various sources at the beginning of each chapter. Okay as an appendix, though. 3 strong stars.

A quietly powerful novel, “Enemy Women” allows the reader to follow in the footsteps of eighteen year old Adair Colley through what some consider the living nightmare that is her life as she travels mostly by foot across the countryside near the end of the Civil War. Adair begins her journey with her two sisters after their home was burned out and their father was beaten and taken by Union guerrilla soldiers. Along the way, the sisters are separated when Adair is falsely accused of aiding the enemy and subsequently imprisoned where she meets and falls in love with the Union major who is her interrogator. Major Neumann helps her escape and her long journey begins.Author Paulette Jiles has created an extraordinary character in Adair, one who is uncommonly well educated and devoid of behavior or actions typical for young women of that era. She exhibits uncommon courage and bravery in the face of numerous circumstances that test her physical endurance, her mental acuity and her indomitable inner spirit. The term “survivor” is certainly apropos. As Adair meets and deals with each challenge as it comes, Jiles deftly reveals the causal changes in her personality and demeanor so we feel the changes with her. It’s a rare talent that can create those illusions and sweep the readers up and carry them along for the ride. This story is rich in texture and poetic phrasing that will make your heart sing. Jiles is a rare talent indeed. My only criticisms are; the numerous obscure terms that were never explained and had me scrambling for my online dictionary, and the strange formatting which omits quotation marks and uses capitalization inconsistently. Four and a half stars.

The novel is set during the last year of the American Civil War. There are enough cruel incidents depicted in the novel; but to emphasize its more general nature, each chapter begins with a contemporary extract depicting the ruthlessness of that war.The prose is magnificent: muscular, vivid, poetic, very American. Idiosyncratically, there are no quotation marks around dialogue, which is irritating at first; but one soon gets used to it.Union troops - both regular army and a lawless and brutal militia - are more or less in control of Missouri, though resisted by Confederate guerillas. The central figure of the book is Adair Colley, aged eighteen when the militia took away her father, a local judge, as a suspect, stole their horses and plundered and wrecked her house. Adair and her two younger sisters set out on a 120 mile walk to the local Union headquarters to find out where their father had been taken. When they got there, Adair was arrested, accused of giving information to Confederates, and sent to a grim women's prison in St. Louis. Major William Neumann, who interrogates her, says she can be free if she writes an account naming the people to whom she is said to have given information. Instead she writes a poetic account of her life, and then a further account of a Confederate plot which is quite obviously a spoof. The major is charmed by these; he has already been impressed by this feisty and fearless young woman.He falls in love with her and she with him. Having found the task of interrogating women distasteful, he asked to be transferred to fighting units (and there will be grisly accounts of what he experiences at the front); and before he goes, he helps Adair to escape from the prison.Wracked with consumption, she makes her way back towards her home. In one place (the coincidence is hard to believe) she is reunited with her favourite horse, and, even harder to believe, even finds a horse that had belonged to her sister. Afoot or on horseback, it is a long and circuitous route, as she has to avoid roads where she might meet soldiers of either side; and there are many pages of descriptions of the wild terrain through which she travels - many days without seeing a soul, punctuated at times by friendly or by dangerous encounters. One marvels at Adair's courage and endurance, even if I found the account of this odyssey a little too long. Her journey ends (but does not end) and the Civil War has just ended also. Tough-minded Paulette Jiles does not give us, after such traumas, even a relatively happy ending.

I'm a Brit with an interest in the American Civil War, which led me to the Tom Hanks Movie. This is my second book by this writer, I enjoyed both the film and the book of The News of the World, so had to read her some more. This is so well laid out, it's easy reading, a believable storyline about a nasty war that she has worked up into a very credible novel with many twists and turns.Up to now my reading of this war had been the sterile histories, heavy of facts and low on the awfulness of it all, the numbers lost meaning etc. This takes you to a different place in that war.A great story, superbly told.

This is an extraordinary novel by any standards. It's got a touching love story set in an appalling civil war that brutalises pretty much everyone involved. Some of it is very hard to read, whether the narrative of Adair and her Major, or the interspersed documentary records of actual testimonies. Sometimes it's very funny, others frightening and shocking. What makes it unusual is its focus on women, children and "incidental" people and animals. I'm a huge reader; I really recommend this book to men and women alike. Chick lit it most definitely isn't.

Find author writes the way I like to read. Enjoyed the story the way it unfolded and how human nature can effect us all . It is a love story but it shows how difficult romance can be sometimes.

I found the writing first class and the narrative absorbing. I was fascinated by Jiles' depiction of Adair Colley and her grit, bravery and endurance. The atmosphere was very effectively evoked. Good, exciting stuff and well-researched! I found the Civil War period extremely engrossing.