The Confederate General Rides North
by Amanda C. Gable, Scribner, 2009, 276 pp.; $26.

Every once in a while there's a book that works so well on so many different levels that it can only be called a treasure. That's The Confederate General Rides North, a book that young adult readers will embrace just as strongly as older adults. That it is Amanda C. Gable's first novel makes it even more extraordinary.

Katherine McConnell, Gable's 11-year old protagonist, reveals as much about pre-adolescence as Holden Caulfield does about being a teenager. Yet Kat hasn't yet learned the wary defensiveness that Holden uses to make it through his days, and that makes her one of the most winning young characters in years.

Kat can't read enough about the Civil War. Her great-great-grandfather was a Rebel soldier, so it is only a short leap for Kat to imagine herself a Confederate general. After all, it is 1968, and there's another war being waged by her country and a private war being waged in her family. If she can't yet understand her family's civil war, Kat can do so with the one she likes studying, the one from a hundred years ago.

Kat's father is a Southerner whose Northern wife has never been able to adjust to being away from her home. So when her artist mother packs up the car one morning for a road trip north, Kat decides to route them through Civil War sites, while her mother dreams of buying antiques for a shop they will open on Cape Cod.

Yet, as they move northward, Kat finds that what she thinks she knows about her family — about the Civil War, even — is put to the test. She will reassess the Civil War and the war in her family and, at 11 years old, come of age.

That happens in Gettysburg, when, as her mother confronts her own past, Kat confronts the realities of living. She recognizes that "all the war, for us at least, is piled up here." It is a moment for someone far beyond her years, a moment that is achingly fitting even as it is achingly rendered.

The Confederate General Rides North refuses to be just another tale of the hazards of growing up. As in the war Kat continues to study, there are no clear-cut sides to be on. There is only Kat's understanding that "none of it can be changed." As Kat's battle ends and she moves on, we, too, recognize that such is the path Gable hopes for us all.

Steven Whitton is a Professor of English at Jacksonville State University.