Book Blurb:
Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield.
And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy – but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband?
My Review: 4.25 stars
The Jackal’s Mistress by Chris Bohjalian is an historical fiction novel that dropped me right into the civil war with wife of a confederate soldier who is missing. I’ve grown to really enjoy historical fiction about the civil war. I read a ton about WWII and good amount of WWI and now I’m hungry for Civil War stories. I learn so much from them.
This one features a great character called Libby who is manning her property as a solo married woman. Both Confederate and Union officers take what they want from her gristmill, and she lets them for fear of repercussion. Although her husband is a Confederate, he freed his slaves and now only a married couple and her niece Jubilee reside on her land. They are her only friends; she leads a very solitary and lonely life.
When she comes upon a severely wounded Union officer in a neighbor’s abandoned house, she makes the difficult but most moral choice to try and save him. It registers with her that she hopes someone would pay the same kindness to her husband if warranted. This novel is filled with tension, suspense, survival, romance, and how the us vs them lines can easily blur. Book clubs will love it!
Quotes I liked:
But war gave them permission to be who they really were, men who were comfortable killing all the kindness and magic and beauty in the world, men whose souls were bleak and, therefore, dangerous.”
“The last bullet. Death with dignity. This was the bullet that would do for you the things your wife never would: that’s why they called it the mistress bullet.”
