The Spy Lover - Kiana Davenport American Civil War fiction is not a genre I seek out, but when I saw Kiana Davenport's name on this one, I couldn't resist. She always provides fresh angles on old stories. I can count on her to teach me something new, with facts as well as points of view. I didn't know that Chinese immigrant men had been kidnapped and forced into service as Confederate soldiers. I also didn't know that women in the South grew opium poppies hidden among their other crops, providing opium "bull's-eyes" to their fighting men to fuel their victories in battle. This of course left a nation full of dope-addicted veterans when the war was over. THE SPY LOVER is smaller in scope and time frame than Davenport's sweeping novels of Hawaii. This one is meant as an homage to two of her ancestors who fought in the Civil War, so the focus is more narrow and there is less opportunity to add complex layers to the characters. The story is told almost entirely in the present tense, which is not my favorite, but I was able to adjust to it as the novel progressed.There are three main characters whose lives are woven together as the novel alternates among their separate experiences of the Civil War. Johnny Tom is a Chinese immigrant who was taken from his family to fight for the South, but he escaped to fight for the North. As he moves from battle to battle and in and out of prisoner-of-war camps, we learn of his life in China and his peregrinations after arriving in America.Era Tom is Johnny's teenage daughter. She agreed to spy for the North in exchange for information about her father's whereabouts. Working as a nurse in a Confederate hospital, she meets and falls in love with Warren Petticomb, a Confederate cavalryman who lost an arm at Shiloh. Era's duties as a spy require her to be duplicitous in her dealings with Warren, but her love is genuine. Can she make him believe in that love when he discovers the truth about her? Davenport manages to tell the story simply without being simplistic. Her purpose in part is to call attention to those who have not received their due in the historical records. At the same time, she reminds us with brutally precise and unflinching imagery of the tremendous toll we paid as a nation for whatever noble gains may have been achieved by the Civil War.