How To Dodge a Cannonball

This first novel from short-story writer Dayle (Everything Abridged) features a white 15-year-old named Anders, who begins as a Union Army flag bearer, changes allegiances when he’s captured by the Confederates, then slips into the uniform of a dead soldier, only to discover he has inadvertently joined a Black regiment in the Union Army by doing so. Treated as a harmless curiosity by his new fellow soldiers, Anders gets to know his comrades, who include a freedman playwright of speculative theater and a Haitian agent-provocateur. Their unit is sent to New York during the Draft Riots, and Anders meets Betsy Ross’s granddaughter. Anders acts in a speculative play staged in the ruins of a Black theater in New York City before his unit is sent west to investigate reports of missing units and a legendary city of silver hidden in the mountains. George McClellan has even taken time off from his presidential campaign to lead the campaign, which all but ensures it will have a bloody ending.