Girls of '64

Georgia, 1864. The war that once felt like distant thunder has arrived at the doorstep of Corinne and Harriot, two cousins whose lives have been upended by the Civil War's final, brutal chapter. Corinne hungers for news of the advancing armies and the changing world those soldiers carry with them. Harriot would rather bake pies than ponder emancipation. When an English cousin named Dorothea arrives from across the ocean, she brings not just a fresh perspective but a mirror to everything these Southern women have taken for granted. Knipe writes with a novelist's instinct for the telling detail: a woman's choice to tend a garden while empires crumble, the way a uniform can transform a stranger into a symbol, the small rebellions that constitute a life when larger freedoms have been stripped away. This is a book about what people do while history happens around them, and how the war that broke the nation also broke open the lives of women who were never supposed to have voices of their own.