NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Martha Hall Kelly's million-copy
bestseller Lilac Girls introduced readers to Caroline Ferriday. Now,
in Sunflower Sisters, Kelly tells the story of Ferriday's ancestor
Georgeanna Woolsey, a Union nurse during the Civil War whose calling
leads her to cross paths with Jemma, a young enslaved girl who is sold
off and conscripted into the army, and Anne-May Wilson, a Southern
plantation mistress whose husband enlists.
"An exquisite tapestry of women determined to defy the molds the world
has for them."--Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author of
Before We Were Yours
Georgeanna "Georgey" Woolsey isn't meant for the world of lavish parties
and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites
the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when
doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them
wrong, she and her sister Eliza venture from New York to Washington,
D.C., to Gettysburg and witness the unparalleled horrors of slavery as
they become involved in the war effort.
In the South, Jemma is enslaved on the Peeler Plantation in Maryland,
where she lives with her mother and father. Her sister, Patience, is
enslaved on the plantation next door, and both live in fear of LeBaron,
an abusive overseer who tracks their every move. When Jemma is sold by
the cruel plantation mistress Anne-May at the same time the Union army
comes through, she sees a chance to finally escape--but only by
abandoning the family she loves.
Anne-May is left behind to run Peeler Plantation when her husband joins
the Union army and her cherished brother enlists with the Confederates.
In charge of the household, she uses the opportunity to follow her own
ambitions and is drawn into a secret Southern network of spies, finally
exposing herself to the fate she deserves.
Inspired by true accounts, Sunflower Sisters provides a vivid,
detailed look at the Civil War experience, from the barbaric and
inhumane plantations, to a war-torn New York City, to the horrors of the
battlefield. It's a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the
brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and
unthinkable racial cruelty, a story still so relevant today.
