New perspective on a reread...

Anyone who knows me knows that I read a lot.  I try to read as many books as I can get my hands on, and I especially like reading something that I've never read before.  But sometimes, you can get so much out of a reread.  I just finished rereading Evvy's Civil War by Miriam Brenaman, and I think the experience taught me as much, or more, about myself than about the time period.  Don't get me wrong, it is a well-written, well-researched book, but I had read it before, so many of the facts had stayed with me.  However, the true intent of the book, perhaps, had been lost on a younger me.  I remember bemoaning the lack of romance, but now I think it was expertly done.  It tells the story of a girl becoming a woman just as the Civil War is brewing.  You see how she hates all the restrictions placed on her simply because of her gender.  Her mother was raised as a Quaker, and her father is primarily an academic, so up to this point, her view of a woman's role was rather skewed, but now she sees the reality.  At one point, she talks to her cousin about their mutual apathy towards children, and this time I can completely relate.  I'm sure at the time I first read it, I simply thought she was being immature.  She faces a lot of the same sorts of realizations about her family as Susan did in The Last Silk Dress by Ann Rinaldi, but the effect it has on her is different.  She still hates slavery, and what it has done to people she cares about, but she has visited her Northern cousins and has a broader perspective of the world; she doesn't blame it all on Southern Corruption, as Susan does.  I guess there isn't a lot more I can go into without revealing too much, but I have to say that I enjoyed watching her find her place in the world, and come to terms with what it meant for her future.  It doesn't glorify what I think of as the 'feminazi' perspective, but it does make me wonder if I would have liked being a woman in the past as much as I have sometimes thought.  I know I don't particularly like being told what to do, so maybe I would have ended up like Evvy.