Dispatched by his mother's ominous premonition, 14-year-old Robey Childs sets out on a dangerous quest to find his father who is fighting for the doomed Confederacy. The boy is given two talismans to keep him safe -- a reversible jacket (one side blue and one side gray) and a magnificent black stallion possessed of preternatural intelligence. The horse guides Robey through the ravaged countryside to the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, where he is transformed fundamentally and forever by what he sees and does. A blend of Robert Browning's haunting, hallucinatory poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" and Cormac McCarthy's masterful novel Blood Meridian, this epic coming-of-age tale by Robert Olmstead is suffused with the violent intensity of an apocalyptic dreamscape. Powerful and unforgettable.