I have to admit I was slightly disappointed at the end of this book. I like historical fiction and am interested in the civil war, but this was basically a love story set in the past. I suppose I should have suspected this when I saw the title, but I had recently read other books by this author which were much better than that. At once, I had predicted most of the storyline and was pretty disinterested until a certain scene which actually shocked me and practically gave this book its three stars because it was so moving. This book could have done with being written in the first person (which I'm pretty sure it wasn't) because the story never strayed from Alice and it might have helped the story hold my interest.