In actuality, I might give this book 2.5 stars? But I definitely didn't really like it, and not just because I'm tired of reading about white upper class women in history (though that definitely played into how I felt about the book.)

It was also all over the place--it followed the war chronologically at first, which makes a lot of sense! But then, once the war ended, we focused on Elizabeth Keckley (who we'd been hearing about the entire time, though mostly as a way to get at what was happening with Mary Lincoln, which........... is Gross, frankly, but okay,) and went back to before the war started? And then gathering up all the Confederate women who we'd started with also borked the timeline. Which also: dealing with the Confederate women is a whole other host of issues, but needless to say there's not a whole lot of mention of white supremacy going on, and how it benefitted the lives of these women. And I get that this book is for a pop audience, but honestly that should not prevent us from being Real about White Supremacy, guys. It's very possible to engage in that kind of reading while still seeing women as whole people, and frankly it's incredibly needed in the popular market.

I will say that the little tidbits one gets--the very short stories--can be kind of amusing, and I've never seen anything about Mother Bickerdyke written in print before, so that was a good surprise, but otherwise, I think there are plenty of very accessible books that do a better job than this one in talking about women and their relationship to the Civil War.