The story opens with bang, Emma fighting as Frank Thompson in the battle that ended the war. She is blown into the air, and remembers:

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Emma on her family’s Canadian farm. Life is full of hard work, endless chores and monotony.  Bright, attractive and an extremely hard worker, Emma watches as her older sisters marry farmers and commit to a joyless life she is determined to avoid. When her much loved brother dies and her father arranges a marriage to ‘quiet her wildness’, Emma sells her horse and escapes to Boston.

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Alone, but full of optimism and determination, she becomes involved in abolitionist politics as she searches for work. No one will hire a woman. One of the treasured books she read as a young girl told the story of a woman who disguised herself as a man and successfully rescued the man she loved.

 

Drawing upon this inspiration, Emma cuts her hair, dons men’s clothing and Frank Thompson arrives in the world. 

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Just as Lincoln sounds the call for seventy-five thousand men. Frank never hesitated. (Emma could shoot and ride better than most men.) He/she managed to join during a brief window at the beginning of the Union army’s recruitment when physical exams were dispensed with due to the overwhelming number of volunteers signing up.

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Frank becomes one of the Union Army’s best soldiers. He and his best friend, Birdie fight heroically at Bull Run. Frank is the last soldier to retreat, and works hard to answer the needs of hundreds of wounded soldiers occupying an old nearby church and over the course of the war Frank becomes a great nurse. (Only men could be nurses until the end of this war.) When General McDowell needs someone to slip behind enemy lines and report back, Frank volunteers. Frank risks his life in this daring, hair raising adventure. 

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Three major battle scenes throughout the story are intense, original and exceptionally well drawn. As the story unfolds, Frank’s commanding officer and noted war hero himself, Cameron Poe struggles between admiration for Frank and a sense that all is not as it seems. It is just after Bull Run when he carries an unconscious Frank back from the abandoned hospital on horse, that he realizes the reason for his unusual attachment to the private. Frank doesn’t realize Cornel Poe knows of her disguise and she fights the powerful pull of their attraction throughout the war. (The story is laced with humorous and emotionally tense love scenes.) 

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Another true to life love story is woven into this story, one that plays to modern questions of gender politics. As Frank forages in confederate territory for food stuffs and supplies, he has a terrifying encounter with a distraught southern belle. Nellie lost her husband, father-in-law and brother at Bull Run and in a pretense of compliance, she tries to shoot Frank. Frank is never bested with a pistol. He drags Nellie off to prison for shooting at a Union soldier, but finally takes pity on her. Franks  says he won’t see her prosecuted if she instead signs up to be a nurse. Nellie has never worked a day in her life and at first tries to dissuade Frank, but eventually she relents. This spoiled Southern Bell goes on to become one of the Union’s best nurses. Never guessing Frank’s disguise, she too, falls in love with Frank.

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The story’s climax is dramatic, heart wrenching and tragic as Frank loses the two people she has come to love most in the world: Cam and Birdie.  

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The story ends with one of the few fictionalized scenes: Frank is singled out from among the remaining soldiers to take a ride in one of the first hot air balloons. From this elevated perspective, he views both the Confederates and Union armies. He is startled by the similarities, and realizing, that though divided, they would ultimately come together in a new nation built on the founding idea of freedom for all the people. 

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Based on the biographies of heroic Emma Edmonds/Frank Thompson this dramatic, unbelievably and yet true story is one that has to be told.