I couldn’t put the book down, mainly because of the first person narrator, Adele Colley, eighteen years old. Author Paulette Jiles prefaces each chapter with factual, primary source documents from the Civil War era that corroborate the riveting plot. The title is based on historical fact regarding the women living in the southeastern Ozarks of Missouri. In the very first pages I discover these “enemy women” were mainly white and poor victims of our bloody American Civil War. Was Enemy Women a Native American story? Fantasy fiction? A sexist polemic? The title as metaphor might describe any era, including 2021. The cover enticed me too-a woman on horseback photographed from behind, her long black hair flying as the dark horse gallops off. Intrigued by the title, I picked up Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles at a discounted bookstore.
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