In an unassuming apartment building in Brooklyn, New York, three lives intersect as the reality of war invades each aspect of their lives. Young Esther is heartbroken when her father decides to enlist in the army shortly after the death of her mother. Penny Goodrich has been in love with Eddie Shaffer for as long as she can remember; now that Eddie's wife is dead, Penny feels she has been given a second chance and offers to care for his children in the hope that he will finally notice her and marry her after the war. And elderly Mr. Mendel, the landlord, waits for the war to end to hear what has happened to his son trapped in war-torn Hungary.
But during the long, endless wait for victory overseas, life on the home front will go from bad to worse. Yet these characters will find themselves growing and changing in ways they never expected--and ultimately discovering truths about God's love...even when He is silent.
How I love my World War II historical fiction.
I enjoyed this one as much as most of the WWII/Holocaust fiction I have read. This one was interesting because it wasn't directly about people who were actually fighting the war or trying to survive Hitler's Final Solution. It was more about the families back home in the United States and how they are effected by that which they have no control over. This was both a good and erroneous approach to the events in my opinion. It was good because it was a perspective I had never considered before, but it was a bit presumptuous and sort of skirting around the actual issues of the war. I mean, it seemed like the author was trying to point out how tough it was for people that didn't go to war, and I'm sitting here thinking 'pretty sure these people should be happy they aren't being shot at or forced into work camps or poisioned in gas chambers.' I know it's rough to have possible family members suffering these atrocities, but don't try to play it off as if they were having such an awful time. At least they could mentally escape it once and a while.
It really made me aware of how slow news traveled back in the day though. I couldn't imagine having to wait weeks on end to hear back from family members overseas. In our day in age, it's easy to communicate almost immediately with anyone anywhere in the world at a moment's notice, but then you would wait weeks at a time to recieve a letter, and even if you wrote letters every day, your correspondent was unlikely to get them one day at a time. They might get 3 letters one day and then have to wait 5 days to get another influx. I'm sure those 5 days would be seem like agony when you know your family member was in harms way.
A frustrating aspect of this novel for me was the over usage of many words and phrases. She probably wrote "conniption fit" about 30 times, and that one particularly stuck out to me because a conniption is a type of fit. So it's redundant. She's saying "fit fit" technically. Drives me up the wall. Austin is not a rookie author and I expect more from authors that have a good 2 dozen+ books under their belt. Kick it up a notch Lynn!
[SPOILER ALERT: Skip this paragraph if you do not want to read any spoilers!!... Ok, are you gone?... seriously just skip down to the next paragraph if you might read this book... last chance... If you are still here consider yourself warned. And if you want to comment on this spoiler in the comments, I request that you also put a spoiler alert at the beginning of your comment. The other issue I had with this book was the ending. I know I prefer happy endings to sad ones, but this one was disappointing in it's unlikelyhood. Every single one of the people overseas that were directly connected to our main characters survived. MILLIONS of people died in the Holocaust, and TENS OF MILLIONS of people died fighting the war, but EVERYONE in this book survived. I find that extremely unlikely and unfair to readers. I guess war isn't so bad, eh? [/sarcasm] [/spoilers]
If you like historical fiction from this era, but want to be a bit removed from all of the violence, this book is perfect for you. It's not as heavy as a lot of the WWII fiction I have read, but it's peripheral enough that you get a bit of a sense of it. It may have it's flaws, but it's definitely worth a read.
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