Genre: General Fiction
Grade: D
I've had a lot of good luck with World War Two tales. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Thanks, Mrs. Fairfax) and The Book Thief (Thanks, Wendy in WI)were both big hits for me. I am always on the look out for another book that can recapture the magic these two wove.
This book is a living testament to what a lovely cover and a good blurb can do for sales because let me assure you, had I known what lay between the covers, this stinker would never have left the store -- or wasted three hours of my life.
I often find myself tongue tied when deeply emotional. In this case, I was so angry and disappointed at the end of the story I found myself hard pressed to do anything but come out here, type the letter F in caps with lots of lovely exclamation points and then move on. I am taking a deep breath and trying to get over myself :-)Still, a description eludes me so here is a brief blurb from Publishers Weekly:
Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husband—a volunteer doctor stationed in England—James comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worlds—a naïve nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terror—with a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime. (Feb.)
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This review acts as though there are three main characters but we spend the majority of our time with Frankie, a hardened reporter who is horrified by the war she sees in Europe and frustrated by her struggles to bring it "home" to the people in America. She can't understand why American's refuse to enter the war and is even more horrified by their refusal to provide asylum to all the people, especially those who are Jewish, who were displaced by the Nazi Regime. It is Frankie's struggle to come to terms with the horror and seeming randomness of war, her conviction that God doesn't exist as proven by said war, and her desire to shake America out of it's comfort zone that make up the bulk of the book. One of Frankie's struggles is what can she actually tell people? Much of what she sees won't pass the censors, the rest of it is truth but a truth that has no frame, no facts to balance it. This is the beginning of the war, when what is to come is only guessed at, when the true horrors have yet to take place.
The real problem to me was that Frankie is not a character but rather a mouth piece for the author's views, which seem trapped in a past she doesn't understand. Little thought seems given to the depression which led the world to 1940, the effect that depression had on current government policies or even the fact that the world had never seen something like the genocide happening in Europe and had no real way to expect it or deal with it. Blake's only concession to the past seemed to be the idea that we should have expected this from Germany after WWI. That surprised me. I know Winston Churchill always felt that the events following WWI, most especially the issue of reparations, caused the war but I had never heard the idea before that the seeds of the genocide actually lay in that war. I was offered no evidence to support this and frankly, don't buy it for a minute.
We see only glimpses of Iris James, a formidable postmaster for a small local office and Emma Fitch, the young wife of a doctor scarred by his past and present so badly that it threatens their very future. It is unfortunate because I would have been interested in their stories had I had more of a chance to actually read them.
In conclusion, here is a quote from the book (page 313), regarding death, that I felt actually referred to the entire tale:
The casual way that one thing led to another, slick as a rope uncoiling and roping silent into the sea, was proof positive that Death - if you could catch him-wore a smile. After all, it wasn't why? It was that's it?
I agree. That's it? How disappointing!
Tea: Don't waste a cuppa.
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