That's exactly how she feels when her father moves out of their house and gives her a typewriter so she can put down on paper the things she's always making the mistake of saying out loud.Trissy feels good about pouring out her problems on the typewriter. And she has plenty of problems, what with her parents' upcoming divorce, the fight with her best friend Steffi, her father's new girlfriend and her mother's boyfriend.Lately all Trissy seems to be good for is finding trouble and quarreling with everybody. Are things ever going to be right again?

    Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living with her widowed mother, five brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in northeastern Louisiana. When Grant moved against Vicksburg, the family fled before the invading armies, eventually found refuge in Texas, and finally returned to a devastated home.Kate began her journal in May, 1861, and made regular entries up to November, 1865. She included briefer sketches in 1867 and 1868. In chronicling her everyday activities, Kate reveals much about a way of life that is no more: books read, plantation management and crops, maintaining slaves in the antebellum period, the attitude and conduct of slaves during the war, the fate of refugees, and civilian morale. Without pretense and with almost photographic clarity, she portrays the South during its darkest hours.