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Enemy Women: A Novel
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Enemy Women: A Novel
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Enemy Women: A Novel
Ebook418 pages7 hours

Enemy Women: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this ebook

For the Colleys of southeastern Missouri, the War between the States is a plague that threatens devastation, despite the family’s avowed neutrality. For eighteen-year-old Adair Colley, it is a nightmare that tears apart her family and forces her and her sisters to flee. The treachery of a fellow traveler, however, brings about her arrest, and she is caged with the criminal and deranged in a filthy women’s prison.

But young Adair finds that love can live even in a place of horror and despair. Her interrogator, a Union major, falls in love with her and vows to return for her when the fighting is over. Before he leaves for battle, he bestows upon her a precious gift: freedom.

Now an escaped "enemy woman," Adair must make her harrowing way south buoyed by a promise . . . seeking a home and a family that may be nothing more than a memory.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMar 17, 2009
ISBN9780061741692
Unavailable
Enemy Women: A Novel
Author

Paulette Jiles

Paulette Jiles is a novelist, poet, and memoirist. She is the author of Cousins, a memoir, and the novels Enemy Women, Stormy Weather, The Color of Lightning, Lighthouse Island, Simon the Fiddler, and News of the World, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. She lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.

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Reviews for Enemy Women

Rating: 3.7032374748201446 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

278 ratings32 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When the Civil War comes up, most of us immediately think of major battles, e.g. Gettysburg, Antietam, fought along the Virginia-Pennsylvania corridor. "Enemy Women" by Paulette Jiles takes place instead in Missouri, one of the 15 slave states, and its story focuses heavily on the injustices and violence suffered by local citizenry. People lost their possessions, their livelihood, basic freedoms, , their loved ones, and sometimes their own lives. Martial law was declared and roving bands of militia populated by untrained thugs, thieves and drunks acted as instant judge, jury and executioner. Our heroine, 18 year old Adair Colley, witnesses her father beaten and arrested, her home ransacked and set afire, and her horses stolen during one such raid. Adair sets out, along with two of her siblings, to plead to the Union Army for her father's release but is denounced by a strangers on the trail and is herself arrested and jailed. While imprisoned, she is interrogated a number of times by one of the Union officers. A bond forms, but before long, the officer is reassigned, and he pledges to find her once the war is over. The book is somewhat reminiscent of Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" in that there are many interesting tales of life on the road while returning home. But frankly, I much preferred Frazier's vignettes - each of which could have stood as an entrancing short story. Like Jiles "The News of the World", this is very well written but I felt only satisfied by its end. I wanted "News" to go on and on, and I was disappointed that the journey in that story had finally ended. I would rate "News" 6 stars, one more than whatever the max is; "Enemy Women" is very good and very informative and I rate that 4 stars. I disliked Jiles' "Sitting in a Club Car...." very much but I will read her "The Color of Lightning" very soon.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I reread this after reading Jiles' "News of the World" which I loved. This doesn't come up to that, but still interesting in portraying the mess in Missouri during and immediately after the Civil War. This book does explain a lot the wide variety of opinions still held by Missourians.Adair Colley is the daughter of a widowed justice of the peace in southern Missouri where she lives with her two younger sisters. Due to the divided sympathies in Missouri, many families were caught between the forces of the Union and the Confederacy. There were militias for the Union, riders for the Confedercy, the Bushwhackers, and then the presence of the two armies. Adair's father is arrested as a conspirator and taken somewhere and Adair is arrested for supposedly being a supporter of the rebels. She is taken to a prison for women in St. Louis. Although the conditions in the prison are awful, she manages to meet a Union officer, Major Newman, who falls in love with her and aids in her escape in light of the fact that he is being transferred back East. Much of the book is about Adair's travels back to her home. She overcomes unbelievable hardships only to find that people have settled in her house. Major Newman has promised to find her after the war and in the ending, he is very near.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Great historical novel during Civil War in Missouri. Gritty and romantic at the same time. Kind of reminds me of True Grit somehow, maybe for the amusing or old style language. Very good.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Without a doubt the period during the Civil War was a complex time, making this a complex story.

    It's told from two viewpoints, that of Adair Colley, a young Missourian woman, (move over Scarlett O'hara) who, along with her two younger sisters are forced to leave their home after a brutal attack on their father by the Union and that of William Neumann, a Union major who encounters young Adair in the prison she is sent to after being set up by suspicious trouble makers. It is while she's in the prison a relationship develops into an attraction, and although they are an unlikely match given they're supposed to be on opposite sides (Adair's family was neutral), the connection they feel is undeniable. Much like the movie, "The Last of the Mohicans," where the line, "I will find you!" cements the conviction of love professed, so too does Neumann's declaration to Adair that he will find her, that all she has to do is go home and wait for him after he provides her a way out.

    What helped add clarity to the storyline were the true accounts provided at the beginning of each chapter from various resources used in Jiles' research. This information imparted credibility and authenticity to the narrative that was unfolding in each of the following chapters - because believe me, some of the behavior would have you thinking people had lost their ever loving minds back then. But we are reading this in a much different time, and have to take into account the behaviors over one hundred and fifty years ago are nothing like today. With a wild West sort of mentality, there were plenty of ne'er do wells who took advantage of others during the time of the Civil War, those who took law and order into their own hands. It seemed there were generous individuals who were also conniving and intent on what they could get out of anyone they helped, and from a research standpoint, this too, rings absolutely true.

    Even while there were lots of unsavory characters to encounter, young Adair is tough, determined and intent on her goal of getting home, and finding her sisters and her father. Particularly toward the end I found I didn't want to put the book down, but quite honestly, all throughout, this story is a real page turner.

    I highly recommend, particularly for readers who loved Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Thats exceptional...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set during the civil war, this book looks at a unique aspect of American war history that I hadn't known about before. Jiles is a fine writer and does a great job in developing her protagonist. Her descriptions are wel done and her characters well developed. It was good enough that I have read it twice.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Hmm. Well, I wasn't overly impressed with the story or the writing, so I took the middle road and gave 3 stars.

    What I do know is that the lack of quotation marks in dialogue is very, very annoying to me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    easy to read
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    nyc
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Paulette Jiles is one of my favorite writers....her prose is beautiful and I need to read her words thoughtfully and carefully to appreciate it. She doesn't provide deep characterization for Adair and William, but she doesn't need to because it's about the story more than the characters. I struggled in the beginning until I remembered to slow down, be patient and wait for the story to develop. My one criticism is the lack of quotation marks; I'm fine with a writer not using quotation marks for the dialogue and I understand why it is done, but it didn't work for me with this book, I found it difficult to distinguish between dialogue and narration. A lovely story and beautiful writing....another great one by Ms. Jiles.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Having read Widow of the South in the past year, I found some similarity in how Southern women did what had to be done to survive during the Civil War. Jiles' work, while also strongly grounded in historical research, brought out more of a dreamy quality and had lyrical descriptions of the countryside mixed in with Adair's adventure.Adair, a spunky 18 yr old, starts out focused on finding out what the Union has done with her father. She soon finds that she needs to keep her wits about her just to survive. And she survives not just by wit but by an openness to whatever force it is that carries us along, and by "a resolute determination not to live in the world as it was" (p.101), as Major Neumann notices.A journey away and return, with much rise and fall of fortunes--I can see why another reviewer called it Homeresque.The lack of quotations around conversations was a bit disconcerting, and at times I had to reread to see what was actually said and what was descriptive, but I had no problems with incomplete sentences which seemed to fit with the randomness of life.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have read quite a few books on the Civil War, but was never that aware of how different the situation might be for civilians in some of the border states until I read this absorbing book by Paulette Jiles, author of Lighthouse Island. The author spent seven years researching the history of the Civil War in Missouri, bringing it to life with this story of a (fictional) heroine for any era, 18-year-old Adair Colley. Jiles takes us back to a time of incredible brutality in Southeastern Missouri as citizens used the cover of war to exact vengeance on personal enemies or to act upon their greed, envy, or lust in ways unacceptable in peacetime. As the story begins, Adair’s father, a civilian and a judge, is savagely beaten and taken away, and the Colley’s home is looted and burned. Adair must find a safe place for herself and her two younger sisters, and she is also determined to locate her father if she can and plead for his return. But as she embarks on her journey with her siblings, a spat between her and other travelers results in her being denounced as a Confederate “spy” and taken to the women’s prison in St. Louis. There, she forges a bond with the Union major charged with interrogating her, but even his friendship can’t change the unhealthy miasma of the prison, or the fact that they are on two different sides of an ideological and geographical divide. Discussion: Jiles gives the Civil War a human face and even more strikingly, one that is decidedly female. Most accounts of the Civil War focus on the men who fought. Jiles shows from her dramatization of real events some of the ways in which the women suffered as well, and how they responded to what was happening to them and their families.Jiles’ story of what happened in Missouri (punctuated by a number of excerpts from historical documents that precede each chapter) is also valuable because it could have easily come from diaries of civilians caught up in contemporary wars. The insight the records provide into the cruel and unjust collateral damage of war is considerable.I really liked Jiles’ more recent book,Lighthouse Island, and when I saw this earlier work by her, I was quick to grab it. I could see elements and themes in this book that would reappear in the later book, although of course the settings are quite different. But they both feature women of courage and character. For those who like strong, resourceful female heroines who do what they must to survive, this is an author not to be missed.Evaluation: Jiles is an adept writer who manages to limn scenes of carnage and destruction with a poetic eloquence that somehow adds to the horror rather than “beautifying” it. But she also lends her poetic hand to the pain, naivety, and hope of love, resulting in an unforgettable story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Well, I did finish this book, although at times I considered sending it on without doing so. The lack of quotation marks was quite a distraction. It made a gritty, realistic book seem dreamy and unfocused. It was an inconsistency that simply did not work for me.I liked Adair, the heroine, and thought she was well-written. Few other characters were, in my opinion.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A young woman's family in Southern Missouri is accused of being Confederate spies during the Civil War. The father is arrested and shot, the son runs off, and the other daugher is thrown in jail. So, the last daugher goes to try to find her father and falls in love with a Union soldier. It was ok - although the best parts were the starts to each chapter where actual quotes from people of the time - this gave what was a pretty thin story more substance.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    2.75 starsIn the Ozark Mountains, the American Civil War is happening. 18-year old Adair's home is set on fire, the family's horses stolen, and her father taken away. Adair leaves with her two younger sisters. She wants to find her dad and her horses and bring them back home. Along the way, however, under martial law, she is arrested and taken away from her sisters.It took me a really long time to get into this book. I only got more interested in the last third of the book, or so (maybe because there was more focus on horses/animals at that point?). There were parts here and there earlier on that tweaked a bit of interest, but not enough. When I finally got into it, I actually did like it, but it just took way too long for that. I'm not a fan of quotes at the start of the chapters and this one has 2-4 quotes at the start of each one, taking up a full page most times! I guess the good news was that it made it faster to read because I skipped over them altogether (after the first couple of chapters). Something else that bugged me at the start (though I did get used to it, and I know sometimes books do this), was the lack of quotation marks when someone was speaking. Overall, I'm rating it just under “o.k.” (which for me, is 3 stars). The last third of the book really brought that rating up.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A story of love, loss, and resilience that offers a poignant look at the men and women of the Civil War. Jiles' crisp writing style paired with snippets of historical testimony from the era powerfully depicts the harrowing journey the protagonist is forced to undertake as she is driven from her home, separated from her family, and forced into a women's prison on false charges.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This novel reminds us of the terrible divisions between the people of Missouri during the Civil War. Even within families, they were torn between supporting Confederate militia (made up of their neighbors) or the Union troops. Jiles builds this story around a family where three daughters led by Adair, the eldest, set out to escape after Union militiamen steal their horses, attempt to burn the house, and capture their father, who has tried to remain neutral. Their brother joins a CSA troop and urges his sisters to head north to St. Louis. Betrayed by another traveler, Adair is captured and ends up in a sordid prison where she is threatened and taunted by her deranged, greedy fellow female prisoners. Through it all, this feisty, strong 18-year-old manages to hold her own, determined to escape and find her father and her sisters; Adair's confidence that everything will be right again even includes her plans to recapture her favorite horse. When the Union major in charge of the prison calls her in for interrogation, she senses his attraction to her and eventually returns his affections. He promises to find her after the war and makes possible her escape before he is transferred to help defend Mobile, where he is wounded in battle. Adair's journey back to the Ozark countryside, evading Missouri militia and Confederate soldiers alike, seemed impossible to me. It was unlikely that a young girl could endure such hardships, all the while suffering from consumption, yet it was an exciting read. The author's decision not to enclose dialogue in quotes was annoying, but I got used to it. This was not my favorite Jiles book, but it certainly kept me turning pages, and the Missouri Civil War history was well told and researched.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thought this was a fresh, original story about a woman struggling to survive the civil war. The story had moments of life like cruelty (betrayal, corruption, abuse) and a good blend of drama and romance. I couldn't put this book down. The lead was a strong female character, and the story was entertaining to read. I liked this, along with Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain."
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A really good book based during the civil war time in Missouri mainly about the rebel women of the war that were taken to prison for war crimes. Very interesting and was a good read!
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This entire novel is told without using quotation marks for dialogue. Personally, I can't help but find this a literary affectation without artistic value that sacrifices clarity without any gain. I recently read and loved Alice Walker's The Color Purple, which also doesn't use quotation marks. But that novel was told through letters, and the writer was supposed to be semi-literate, so there it worked, and Walker's novel flowed well enough, was riveting enough, it didn't bother me in the least. The lack of quotation marks did bother me in Enemy Women--greatly. The style, story and characters weren't enough to carry me through the weirdness, and I found myself more and more jarred and irritated until I realized I just didn't care enough about the teenaged Adair Colley to suffer hundreds of pages of this to find out if she survived the travails of the American Civil War.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enemy Women is a Civil War novel set in the Missouri Ozarks. Missouri was one of the so-called fringe states where the population was mixed in it's support for either the Federals or the Confederates. This in turn lead to neighbour turning on neighbour, and suspicions and hard feelings running rampant.As the major battles were being fought across other states, Missouri was being trampled by Militia, belonging to both sides. One week the Confederates would ride through seeking food, shelter and plunder and the next week it would be the Union Militia. The atrocities were many and shared by both sides.The story focus is on Adair Colley, a young eighteen year old girl who sees her father beaten and taken prisoner while she and her sisters are turned out on the road. They try to inquire about the whereabouts of their father, but instead, Adair is taken prisoner herself, accused of being a spy. Sent to St. Louis and placed in a woman's prison, she meets a Union major whose job is to interrogate the prisoners. After numerous talks they realize that they have fallen in love, but he is about to be transferred. He arranges for her to escape and she begins a long trek back to her home in the Ozarks searching for her family.Paulette Jiles is a poet, and that certainly shows through in her lyrical writing. She is able to paint pictures with her words and made the story both captivating and authentic. I was bothered that quotation marks were not used, I found it most unsettling. I did however, like the heroine, Adair as I found her to be spunky, strong and believable. Overall a good read about a small corner of the Civil War.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've read a lot a novels set during the Civil War, but knew little about the events in Missouri and the surrounding area before reading this book. The main character, Adair, quickly gained my admiration and respect for her strength and spirit. I enjoyed the quotes and excerpts from actual Civil War documents (both Union and Confederate) at the beginning of each chapter. They seem to keep the novel grounded in historical fact, even though the characters and compelling story are fiction. Paulette Jiles' writing is outstanding, truly making the setting and emotions of the characters come to life. I found myself reading some passages over just to enjoy the mental pictures her words create. The ending came too soon!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I had some mixed feelings about this book. Usually I really enjoy a book that takes place in an area that I'm familiar with because it really brings the setting alive for me. However in this case I was perhaps too familiar with St. Louis city because when the author took literary license (more than once) with the geography of downtown St. Louis, it immediately threw me out of the story. I really enjoyed the quotes from various historical documents and civil war texts at the beginning of each chapter and learned a great deal I didn't know about the civil war, however I found the author's technique of moving the plot ahead using a series of marvelous coincidences slightly annoying.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Paulette Jiles knocked my socks off with her ‘Color of Lightning’, so I scrambled to find another of her books. Sockless, again! A strong writer, she gives an authentic voice to her characters, and sets them in vividly rendered locations. Her stories are compelling; the historical events true, around which she weaves her words. In her historical novel, ENEMY WOMEN, Jiles shares some actual letters, written, some by northerners, some by southerners. One letter from 1861: “There will be trouble in Missouri until the Secesh are subjugated and made to know that they are not only powerless, but that any attempts to make trouble here will bring upon them certain destruction and this … must not be confined to soldiers and fighting men, but must be extended to non-combatant men and women.”And so begins a horrible chapter in the history of Missouri. The men of the area were still off fighting in the War Between the States, or acting as gorilla soldiers trying to protect their homes and villages from being ravaged by unscrupulous union soldiers. Women, while feeding their own husbands when they returned from their war duties, were charged as collaborators - enemies of the Union. Homes were burned, menfolk (and often whole families) were killed, or the women and children marched to prisons in St. Louis. Jiles imagines a family set into this moment in history; her main character a young woman, the oldest sibling, and how she reacts to the circumstances in which she finds herself. A fascinating story, start to finish; well imagined and well told. The characters and story both felt true to the times. Her sense of place was perfect, too. I lived, for a short time, in the area depicted. I’ve walked in the Current River, sat with my children on its pebbly ‘beaches’ in Van Buren, hiked through parts of the Mark Twain National Forest, climbed around the boulders of Johnson’s Shut-Ins listening to the roar of the water. Her descriptions transplanted me right back there. Two notes, though: (1) The one thing this book lacked was a map. In ‘Color of Lightning’, I found myself referring back to the maps quite often, and really felt its lack here. Enemy Women was an earlier work; perhaps reprints will include a map. (2) As I began this book, it initially bothered me that the words ‘spoken’ by the characters were not shown in quotes. But I wasn’t bothered long. It was a seamless technique that at least worked for her in this time and place. A taste (p.12): “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.”Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is written in the vernacular of the remote regions of Southern Missouri during the Civil War. The lead character is a likeable and admirable 14 year old girl who instantly draws you into the story. She enables you to see things through her eyes as she endures the trials and tribulations of the Civil War.As much as I've read about that awful war, this book offered a different perspective. People who lived in battle zones, or even near the periphery, suffered horribly. Yet th...more This book is written in the vernacular of the remote regions of Southern Missouri during the Civil War. The lead character is a likeable and admirable 14 year old girl who instantly draws you into the story. She enables you to see things through her eyes as she endures the trials and tribulations of the Civil War.As much as I've read about that awful war, this book offered a different perspective. People who lived in battle zones, or even near the periphery, suffered horribly. Yet they faced every day with courage and a plodding resolve to somehow get through it all.I loved the poetry of the author's writing, often rereading a particularly touching or descriptive sentence. She is also a poet as well as a writer of novels, and it shows.Very enjoyable, I will likely reread, and will most definitely recommend to my book club and friends.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a grim story, necessarily so, due to the theme of survival during the American Civil War. However, it is also a love story between a man and woman on opposite sides of the conflict, between a woman and her horses, and the propensity of the human spirit to persevere when the world around is cruel and unflinching. As another reviewer commented, the format was at first a little difficult, but soon augmented the tempo of Jiles' prose. I loved it. Also recommend Doctorow's The March.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It annoys me when books don't use quotation marks for dialogue. Adair was very, very irritating as a protagonist for most of the book, but toward the end when she grows up a little, she's a little more tolerable.The only parts I really liked about this book were the description of the horses and the bits of history at the beginning of each chapter.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found this book to be entertaining...surprisingly so. Adair takes over and flees with her sisters before being taken prisoner. Will Neumann gives some help but Adair does the work of surviving and escaping and finding her horse Whiskey.