Let's take this hurdle -- it's another Civil War story. But let's hasten to add -- it is a new angle, a new setting, and it has a different motive. One has a sense of contemporary facets, a peep into the lives and hearts of the families behind the lines in Richmond during the successive campaigns waged around the city. One sees the rest of the war only as it effects Richmond and the characters in the story. Almost it reads like journalistic reporting of personal experiences. There is a social aspect generally ignored -- the ironing out of social lines, the involvement of emotions of young people who ordinarily would not have met, the shifting of values. Not a story of war manoeuvres but of human passions. Worth reading.