Rosetta Wakefield cannot bear the thought of her husband, Jeremiah, enlisting in the Union Army. When he and his friends do anyway, she decides to join him, presenting herself as Ross Stone to the men and officers of the 97th New York. Jeremiah is not best pleased, but then Rosetta never has been a conventional kind of girl. Together, then, they embark on the Union campaigns of 1862, from Second Manassas and Antietam, to places without name.
Although I Shall Be Near You is completely dissimilar in style and content to The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, my mind kept returning to the latter, and specifically to the men joining up en masse (in this case, the British Army circa World War I) for a "great adventure" only to get far more than they bargained for when it came to fighting the war.
Erin Lindsay McCabe's I Shall Be Near You is a magnificent story that pulls the reader along. The Wakefields, like the majority of soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, were neither educated nor wealthy, and McCabe captions their lives perfectly in her language and tone. The supporting cast of characters, particularly enlisted man Will, are genuinely sympathetic.
Five stars.
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