FICTION
‘Sisters of Shiloh’
By Kathy and Becky Hepinstall
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24, 256 pages
Chiggers aren’t the only thing eating at the battle-weary Stonewall Brigade. The ragtag flank of dusty, hungry and shoeless soldiers has taken to speculating about the peculiarities of two new recruits, Thomas and Joseph Holden. The cousins claimed to be 18 when they joined the Army of Northern Virginia, but their beardless faces and petite stature suggest they’re much younger.
Nobody realizes that the cousins are secretly sisters, Libby and Josephine Beale. If the premise of “Sisters of Shiloh” sounds unbelievable, the surprising truth is that authors (and sisters) Kathy and Becky Hepinstall based their charismatic historical novel on facts. At least 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. This peculiar footnote to history was explored last year from the perspective of a Union soldier in Laird Hunt’s lively novel, “Neverhome.”
The engrossing, beguiling “Sisters of Shiloh” jumps narrative points of view between its protagonists and their fellow soldiers. Libby, “the pretty one,” concocts a revenge scheme after her husband, Arden, is killed at the Battle of Antietam. Josephine, her “pale, chip-toothed and uncertain” protector, knows that Libby won’t rest until she’s slaughtered 21 Yankees — one for each year of Arden’s life. The women chop off their hair, tie down their bosoms and fib their way into military service.
Their ragtag company of Confederates believes “that the Southern cause was true, that Stonewall Jackson was God, and that all soldiers were men.” Not everyone shares those views. Josephine, aka Joseph, grows close with young Wesley Abiline, a guitar-picking daydreamer and discovers he holds no strong allegiance to either side.
A lucky series of remote bathing ponds and other plot contrivances allows the sisters to keep their parts private on the long march toward Fredericksburg. But Josephine finds it much harder to hide her budding crush on Wesley, a situation that gradually becomes confounding for both parties.
Their titillating flirtations and frustration prove more engrossing than Libby’s ongoing vendetta. The novel begins with a chilling visitation from the pale, bloody ghost of Arden, who demands to know how many Yankees Libby has killed so far. He suggests that Josephine may have played a role in his death — a compelling accusation that never quite reaches a satisfying conclusion.
The apparition introduces a supernatural subtext that darkens the corners of the novel and keeps delivering goose bumps. Mysterious lights appear on battlefields and over fresh graves. Characters receive visions of impending death.
“Ghosts are everywhere,” says Wesley, “and once in a while, a man starts to feel like a ghost himself.” The statement proves to be prescient on multiple fronts. Libby’s frequent conversations with Arden morph into ethereal possession as she begins to walk and talk like her late husband.
The authors deserve props for the obvious research into the maladies that plagued both armies. Becky Hepinstall holds a history degree while Kathy has published three previous novels, including “Blue Asylum,” another Civil War romance with Southern Gothic flourishes. While the book’s eerie overtones are handled well, the gag-inducing descriptions of battlefield carnage and Civil War medical practices border on excessive. When it comes to lice, chiggers and dismembered limbs, less really is more.
The spooky stuff and hack-and-slash fighting scenes would fit nicely into a horror novel or Quentin Tarantino film. “Sisters of Sisters” is neither. (Yet.) This gender-bender is ultimately a historical romance, a subgenre that thrives on the heroine-disguised-as-a-man trope. Though it takes several chapters for sparks to fly between Josephine and Wesley, the eventual heat keeps the story alive as things grow cold between the sisters.
Descriptions of physicality, especially Libby’s many flashbacks to Arden’s “smooth and muscular” body, read like passages from a bodice-ripper. The dialogue makes uneducated Southern soldiers sound like contemporary suburban teenagers, referring to elders as “dinosaurs” and telling each other, “Stop it. Just stop.” That is, unless they’re quoting passages from “Les Misérables,” a curious preoccupation among the brigade.
Elsewhere, the prose reveals an ear for poetry. “The North took one step forward and two steps back, waltz of the temporary victory.” The army marches toward Fredericksburg as “one animal now, a conflicted beast who sometimes smiled in its slumber, sometimes screamed in it.”
The same could be said of the Beale sisters and their struggles to pass as men. While Libby mimics her dead husband to the point of losing her identity, Josephine discovers a nascent femininity while wearing the scratchy gray uniform. What started as simple deception becomes more complicated, “a masquerade within a disguise.”
Overall, the gender politics of “Sisters of Shiloh” play it safe. Josephine’s early discovery that a soldier is secretly writing love letters to a man seems to be an important plot point, but the thread is lost. Her eventual reckoning has less to do with Libby and more with finding unity among the disparate parts of herself.
The escalating stress of deployment also has a way of dissolving gender roles. Soldiers pair up on winter nights and spoon to keep freezing. The lack of women doesn’t stop the brigade from getting drunk and dancing together. The revelry of their pre-battle dance and silly abandon during snowball fights suggests that the old adage about war turning boys into men isn’t necessarily accurate. In “Sisters of Shiloh,” war turns women into men and men into boys.
