In September 1862, twelve-year-old Roxana Delfield watches from the hills above Antietam Creek as the bloodiest single day in American history unfolds below her family's farm. Curtis's quietly devastating novel tells the Civil War through a child's eyes, not as politics or abstraction, but as something heard, smelled, and feared by a young girl still learning what loyalty means in a border state torn between North and South. Roxy's world narrows to the immediate: her father's secret sympathy for the South, a wounded Confederate soldier hidden in the barn, friendships that straddle lines that now divide families and neighbors. The war arrives not in glory but in the practical terror of a girl forced to choose between what she's been taught and what she sees. Curtis writes with restrained power, letting the horror of that September morning speak for itself while Roxy's innocent perspective makes the moral tangle of the Civil War newly visible.
