Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Anna Kerrigan is a young woman who is doing her part in the war effort by working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  But she longs for more.  Her father disappeared several years ago without a trace.  Her mother struggles to care for Lydia, Anna's sickly and disabled sister while Anna is the glue trying to hold their lives together.

And Anna wants more from life.  She applies to be a diver at the Navy Yard and the men want nothing better to see her fail. But she turns out to be the strongest diver on the team. Anna is strong and tough when it comes to her personal life as well. She takes us deep into the world of nightclubs run by gangsters.

I haven't read Ms. Egan's other novel that was a Pulitzer Prize winner, but I wouldn't call Manhattan Beach a prize winning novel. It is meticulously researched. The diving scenes make the reader feel as if they are also underwater in a clumsy suit weighing 200 pounds.  As the gangster Dexter Styles faces his almost certain execution, I could see the beads of sweat forming on his brow.  And when Eddie's merchant marine ship sank in the middle of a fierce storm, my heartbeat rose along with their desperation to survive. The pages in-between the griping scenes were not nearly as exciting.

Manhattan Beach is a well written novel, with sharp and engaging characters and an interesting plot.  The lives of the characters are expertly interwoven together. For me the historical backdrop of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and World War II added to my reading pleasure.  This was an enjoyable read but not the page turner I was hoping to find.  

Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave

Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave

Mary North lives a life a privilege in London as the Germans are approaching during WWII.  Being young and desperate not to repeat her mother's unfulfilled existence, she signs up to volunteer at the War Office.  She's sent to teach, but when the children are sent to the countryside and the other teachers dismiss Mary's unconventional style, she finds herself without a purpose once again.

She meets Tom Shaw, the school's superintendent and their love affair immediately begins.  Tom's roommate, Alistair Heath enlists and the war suddenly becomes all too real.  This is a story of war, raw and painful, emotionally as well as physically.  Chris Cleave leaves it all on the table.

Everyone Brave is Forgiven is a realistic tale of the pain and heartbreak of war.  Mary and Tom and Alistair are wonderful characters that a reader can't help but care for.  How each of them deals with the obstacles they are facing leaves us deeply entrenched in their bomb riddled world.  

Lately I've been fascinated with stories of World War II.  So if I've been reading too many of them for your taste, please forgive me.  I'm hooked.  Everyone Brave is Forgiven is a well written love story set in the confines of war.  But it's one you will never forget for it's portrayal of a perilous time and for it's rendering of love of all kinds.

The Baker's Secret by Stephen P Kieran

The Baker's Secret by Stephen P Kieran

The Baker's Secret is set in a small village in Normandy, that is suffering under Nazi occupation during World War II.  Emma, who had been apprenticed to Uncle Ezra, the village baker, at age 18, is convinced the Allies will never come to rescue them.  She takes things into her own hands in an effort help her starving neighbors when Ezra is brutally executed after being forced to wear the yellow Star of David.

Her secret is adding straw to the bread she is made to bake each morning for the Kommandant. The two extra loaves she's able to bake from the extra dough are hidden from the Germans and passed around to the villagers.  Emma is quite clever, managing to find eggs, tobacco and fuel, distributing it to those who need it most to survive.  That is all anyone in the village wants to do, survive.

The first half of this book, I found to be stiff and sluggish.  Being a historical novel, we know how it's going to end. The Allies will come and prove Emma wrong. And what this author did very well, was build of the tension on that day.  June 5, 1944, Emma sets out on her daily rounds, but some things are askew and the roar of planes overhead distract her thinking.  The reader is led through all the changes in the usual sounds and landscape of the area with increasing anxiety.  And by the time the American soldiers appeared at Emma's door, I had tears in my eyes.

All good books should make the reader feel emotion.  Although The Baker's Secret had a slow start, it ended leaving a warm spot in my heart.  May we never forget the sacrifice our countrymen made for others in the name of freedom.

The Letter by Kathryn Hughes

The Letter by Kathryn Hughes

A friend of mine asked me recently if I'd read this book.  I hadn't heard of it but I was intrigued by the title.  I happen to love letters.  They are a dying art and I miss finding them in my mailbox.  I checked it out on Amazon and fell for the tag line of "Number 1 Bestseller that everyone is talking about".  The book sounded like everything I would love to read.

In 1973 Tina is trapped in an abusive marriage.  She works as a typist during the week and volunteers her time in a thrift shop on Saturdays.  One day she finds an old letter in the pocket of a man's suit left in a bag of clothes on the shop's doorstep.  She's intrigued by the words of a young man, Billy, as he professes his love and commitment to Christina.  Tina decides she'd like to deliver the letter herself even though it is 40 years later.  But as her own marriage falls apart, Tina's desire to find Billy and Christina is put on the back burner.

The story then flashes back to 1939 and a young girl, Chrissie, defies her parents and falls in love with Billy.  A series of tragic turns rips the lovers apart.  A letter meant to mend broken hearts is deliberately never delivered by Chrissie's father.  The letter at the center of this story is actually very sweet and heart warming.  But the story surrounding it is ordinary at best.  The circumstances were so predictable I could have told the rest of the story myself and arrived at the same conclusion after reading less than the first fifty pages.  The characters were flat and one dimensional, the settings, ordinary.

The promise of the letter had so much potential, but it fell far short.  And if this is the "Number 1 Bestseller that everyone is talking about", I need to find myself another conversation.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

I'm not sure why I felt the need to read this book again, other than I'd suddenly immersed myself in World War II books and movies.  I'd probably been required to read it as a teenager for school and something in my memory about Anne Frank rose to the surface.

Now in my sixties, I can relate to Anne's story with an entirely different perspective.  The first entry is dated near the beginning of June, 1942.  My husband was born June 4, 1942.  I stopped dead in my tracks.  On one hand a baby is born in America, into a safe and loving home, doing all those things a new baby is supposed to do.  On the other hand, across the ocean, war is raging and a young girl is preparing to go into hiding in an attempt to save her life and those of her family.  Reading the dates at the beginning of each entry served to make Anne's story personal for me.  When I read the book the first time, I can guarantee, I made no connection to the calendar.

Anne is a teenage girl, growing up in abnormal circumstances.  She wants to fall in love, she wonders if she's pretty and she wants to see the sun again, all the things young girls wonder about. Her thoughts and emotions are written on the pages of her diary.  They are the same emotions that a teenage girl experiences no matter what the time and place of her life.

Many years ago I visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam.  It's a sobering event.  But I have to say that reading Anne's diary again at this time in my life made her even more real to me.  Anne's story uses war and hatred as the backdrop to growing up. Her story has impacted me now more than ever.  It is timeless.

Garden of Stones by Sophie Littlefield

Garden of Stones by Sophie Littlefield

We meet Lucy Takeda and her daughter, Patty when a police officer arrives on their doorstep to question Lucy about a murder of a local man.  On the eve of Patty's wedding, Lucy is forced to reveal the story of her time in a Japanese internment camp as a teenager.

Lucy's parents seem to have it all.  Her father owns a business, her mother is a stunning beauty, they live in a nice house in Los Angeles.  Soon after her father dies, Pearl Harbor happens.  Everyone of Japanese decent is forced into camps.  Lucy's life turns from happy and comfortable into a game of survival.

Garden of Stones paints a very dark yet realistic picture of life in these camps.  Lucy was forced to grow up in a hurry.  She begins to share her life story with Patty but still feels she has to hold some things back to protect Patty.  But Patty is desperate to find the truth in order to get her mother released from police custody.

I loved the historical aspects of this book but struggled with the holes in the story.  For me the Garden of Stones had a small and inconsequential role to the story yet it was chosen for the title. The reader is led down a very specific path about Patty's birth only to have that yanked out from under them.  I'm all for twists and turns to make a story interesting, but these ended up being unrealistic.  Needless to say I was disappointed in the outcome.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows, Mary Ann Shaffer

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows, Mary Ann Shaffer

I've read this book before but decided to read it again.  Why?  Because in 2 weeks time I'm leaving on a cruise around the British Isles.  And the first stop is St Peter Port, Guernsey, The Channel Islands.  This novel seemed like the perfect way to prepare for what I'm going to see there.

Juliet is a writer looking for a topic for her next novel when she receives a letter from a man living on Guernsey.  He's read a book by his favorite author and the book had been inscribed to Juliet.  So begins her correspondence with the post war residents of the island.  Their stories of the German occupation are fascinating and Juliet just may have landed on the perfect new story for publication.  She decides to visit them and falls deeply in love in more ways than one.

The members of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society are an eclectic cast of characters who all want to get in on the action to correspond with the well known author.  They each tell their own story in their own words. And what a story they tell about life during the German occupation.  They found joy on even the darkest days.

I love stories that are written as letters.  Modern society has lost the fine art of written correspondence.  An email is simply not the same.  Fine penmanship has also gone by the wayside. Juliet and her new friends were able to convey emotion in a handwritten post that brought them together quickly.  Their bonds sealed by the time they had licked the stamp and dropped the letter into a mailbox.   I can't wait to see this charming place and imagine each of the inhabitants as they went about their daily lives.  And I can't wait to handwrite a postcard, buy a local stamp and mail it home.

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

I recently read an article about Herman Wouk.  He's 100 years old and still going strong.  He's led a great writing life which all of us wanna be authors long to have.  I knew his name but had never read any of his work so I was ecstatic when my trusty book club decided to read it.  It was the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1951 so I'm always happy when I can cross one of those off my list.

Willie Keith is a Princeton boy, fresh out of college and off to Naval Officer Training school to serve his country during World War II.  While there he earns the distinction of having more demerits than anyone else, and barely shy of requiring expulsion.  Willie has a talent for making up silly songs which he sings in a nightclub just for fun.  While there he meets a beautiful lounge singer, May Wynn.  The pair fall in love but struggle to reconcile the very different cultures in which they've been raised.

Willie is shipped off to an ancient rust bucket, a minesweeper, The Caine.  His life on board under the direction of an eccentric and overwhelmed, Captain Queeg, turn the pampered mama's boy into a man.  As a writer, I pay attention to how characters change and grow in the midst of the story.

Herman Wouk doesn't write fancy prose or use complicated literary devices.  He's simply an excellent storyteller.  The Caine Mutiny is a compelling story, well told.  I felt it dragged on especially during the court martial and I didn't quite understand the the storyline of the naval lawyer, but neither detracted from my overall enjoyment of the novel.

I have to add that the history lesson that lives within these pages is a good one.  The Caine Mutiny is one that will stick with me for a long time.  Sometimes there is nothing like a good, old fashioned classic to stimulated my gray matter and enrich my reading list.  

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I've been told I've been pretty negative in several of my recent reviews.  The writing isn't any good, I've been repeating over and over.  I took some time to think over this feedback and I came to the conclusion that I've been wasting my time reading alot of books that weren't worth my time.  But that's about to change.

At first glance, you may think this novel is the story of Liesel, a young girl whose mother gives her up to a poor, foster family as Hilter's reign in Germany is on the rise.  On the trip to her new home, she watches her brother die and steals her first book.  She can not read but is fascinated by the words it contains.  Papa teaches her to understand the words while soothing her nightmares.  Mama vocalizes the words that teach her to face head on the hand life has dealt.

And you may think this is another story about the ravages of war and the Holocaust.  But it's not.  The Book Thief is the story of the power of words.  We learn how words are used to exert dominance and control and how words can express fear and grief.  But Liesel shows us how words can build friendships and fill empty hearts with love. 

The Book Thief is set during a dark period of world history.  It is beautifully poetic about how life was viewed through the eyes of an innocent child.  A story, like The Book Thief that can bring me to tears, is a story I want to savor in my mind and save on my bookshelf forever. 

City of the Sun by Juliana Maio

City of the Sun by Juliana Maio

World War II is raging throughout Europe, but for Detroit Free Press journalist, Mickey Connelly, the story is in Egypt.  Maya is a Jewish refugee who ends up in Cairo as a stop on the way to freedom for her and her family.  Their chance meeting sets this novel in motion.

Lately, I've been reading alot of historical novels.  I'm enthralled by stories of the World Wars. The setting in Africa is a fresh approach and it's a part of history I was not familiar with.  All good things. 

City of the Sun has the everything, romance, intrigue, murder all in an exotic setting.  The novel is well paced and I never became bored but some parts I enjoyed more than others.  The ending left me unsatisfied.  When I thought about why I felt this way, I realized the author never decided if this was to be a historical novel, a romance or a spy thriller.  Although the novel has merit, it never found its true focus.  As a reader I never found that warm and fuzzy feeling I long to have inside a good book.

The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit

The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit

Thank you to NetGalley for my advanced copy of The Wives of Los Alamos. I thoroughly enjoyed every single page.  This novel has a release date of February 24, 2014.  Pre order it now.  You won't regret it.

The wives and families of the scientists, physicists, construction workers and support personnel who worked in Los Alamos lived in secret.  Their husbands knew they were building an atomic bomb but couldn't tell their wives why they had come to a dry and secluded place in New Mexico without being able to tell anyone where they had gone.  Everything about Los Alamos was foreign to them. They had trouble remembering the new names they were given upon arrival.  They were given a house based on the size of their family.  Their lips became chapped. And when all they wanted to do was soak in a hot bathtub, the home only had a shower and the water wouldn't come on anyway.

What I loved most about this story is that it is written in first person plural.  First person plural is unusual and only an extremely talented writer can pull it off. The women seem to march through this period of their lives together yet the reader has a very clear sense that the wives had different views of the sequestered life they were living.  They liked each other and some they couldn't trust, some loved their husbands and some sought love elsewhere, some made the best of it and others simply could not.

This slice of history in the early 1940's during war time is fascinating.  The decision to work on building a bomb of mass destruction under the cloak of secrecy took a heavy toll on the families.  Yet the wives often made me laugh.  Their positive attitudes kept them going.  The Wives of Los Alamos  keeps this story alive in a delightful way.  I adored every minute of it.