India Moody is twelve years old when the Civil War comes to the Shenandoah Valley. She's excited by the glamour, but day-by-day and battle-by-battle, she will lose nearly everything she loves. She needs to hold on to her defiance and her determination to be the kind of woman she chooses to be, and that includes chemistry and botany, and the man she loves. War, it turns out, is hell.