Central Kansas Library System

Jethro, who is nine years old when the first April blooms, must run the farm in southern Illinois almost alone during the Civil War. Dangers on the home front prove as exciting as those in battle.

The diary of a fictional fourteen-year-old girl living in Virginia, in which she describes the hardships endured by her family and friends during one year of the Civil War.

In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war.

A story as full of emotion and drama as the characters themselves. Born within a year of each other and in the same North Carolina county, Mayme and Katie had grown up in two separate worlds. Mayme was a member of a slave family, and her future held nothing but slavery and hardship. Katie's future was bright with promise -- a Southern family's genteel plantation life surrounded by books and music and culture. Then came the Emancipation Proclamation...