On her fourteenth birthday in June of 1861, spunky Evelyn Chamberlyn finds herself stuffed into a corset, a dress with hoops and a hairstyle so ornate she calls it the Edifice. It is time for her to be introduced to society-no more climbing fences and jumping into streams. She is expected to be a lady now.

But Evvy has an agenda of her own, questions of her own, and soon finds answers of her own too. She wants to prove that a woman can do everything a man can, and still be a true woman. But in order to find out all she needs to know, and keep her family together as the war rages around them, she must uncover her family's secrets, and ultimately make impossible choices.

Evvy's fascinating story of honor, love and a little sneakiness is based on the real diaries of Civil War-era women, whose legacy became the next generation of feminists, the suffragettes. More than that, she is an independent-minded heroine whose thoughts and ideas shed a new light on what it meant to be southern and female during the Civil War.