Eighth grade starts out the same as every other year for Breeze Brannigan. Shes still the tallest student, boy or girl, in her class, wears shoes that would fit an elephant, and her smile reveals dazzling braces that blind everyone within ten feet.
Then she meets Cam , the new boy in school who speaks with an accent and must be from another planet, for none of the earthling boys she knows are so polite. He also has a secret, a secret that could mean life or death for Cam and his mother and that Breeze must help him keep.

In 1863 Vicksburg, Mississippi, outspoken fourteen-year-old Lizzie Stamford yields to her secret desire to join the Confederate Army disguised as a boy, but she quickly learns that neither war nor all Yankees are what she believed them to be.