How to Dodge a Cannonball

Dayle (Everything Abridged: Stories) delivers a bracing Civil War satire focused on a young white volunteer’s reversals of fortune. Anders, 15, joins the Union Army as a morale-boosting flag twirler, desperate to get away from his overbearing mother. He switches his allegiance after he’s captured by Confederate soldiers (“No man deserved to lose his property, human or otherwise,” Dayle wryly writes), then defects back to the Union side after barely surviving the Battle of Gettysburg. He joins an all-Black regiment by passing himself off as an octoroon, having taken on the identity of a fallen soldier, and makes friends with Tobias Gleason, a Black soldier who writes science fiction plays. The regiment moves on to New York, where Anders and Gleason help to quell the Draft Riots, and then Nevada, where they take part in a “standard Indian purge,” which provokes them, and other Black soldiers, to desert and find sanctuary at the free city of San Valentin. An assault on San Valentin by Union general James McClellan leads to a final convulsive act of political theater. In Anders, Dayle has crafted an American Candide, whose naive beliefs are comically tested by his experiences with war and racism. This epic novel channels the absurdity of Catch-22 and the whimsical invention of The Intuitionist. It’s a blast. (June)