Liar Temptress Soldier Spy

My book club chose to read Liar Temptress Soldier Spy: Four Women Undercover In The Civil War by Karen Abbott.  This book was a challenge for me.  The author, after moving to Georgia for a couple years, realized the Civil War is not completely over for some people.  So she wanted to revisit the story and look for the bad women in the story; the women who didn't follow the rules; the women who acted in unconventional ways.  She found four of them.  One was a liar, one a temptress, one a soldier and one was a spy.  My problem was she wrote the stories as they happened on the calendar.  I would have found it easier to read the story of one woman at a time instead of how things happened in chronological order.  I couldn't keep the women straight or even which side they were on straight.  Other people in my book club had the same trouble and some of them even kept notes on the four women.  The women in this story got away with bold acts of espionage because women weren't considered to be capable of such a crime.  This assumption made many men come across rather poorly because they were duped time after time.  One woman out of the four made the greatest risk of all because if she had been found out she might have been murdered by the men on her own side. That woman was the soldier who pretended to be a man.  If her fellow soldiers ever found out they may have killed her on the spot.  That happened to other women pretending to be men.  Ironically this woman/soldier's commanding officer asked her to go undercover and pretend she was a woman.  She did that quite well.  Before the war ended she went AWOL and back to being a woman.  So even though I skimmed quite a bit and didn't comprehend it all, I enjoyed this story and am glad I took up the challenge and read it..