Straddling two continents during the tumultuous early years of the second world war, Sarah Blake's novel is a masterpiece, evoking bygone days with clarity and insight.
Moving back and forth from Franklin, Massachusetts, a small town in Cape Cod to overseas in London, England, Sarah chronicles the lives of two women. Iris James is Franklin's postmistress - her deeply held belief in the orderliness of the U.S. postal service mirrors a life with rigidly held beliefs of right and wrong.
In London, U.S. news broadcaster, Frankie Bard, is one of only a handful of women on the radio during wartime. Working under the tutelage of Edward R. Murrow, Frankie is learning how to report the insanity of the Blitz and how people's lives are being destroyed or simply disappearing in the aftermaths of nightime bombing.
The lives of Iris James and Frankie Bard intersect with the letters of Will Fitch, Franklin's medical doctor, who volunteers to help in the war effort in London while his wife Emma waits at home, praying for his safe return. Every day Emma walks to the post office gathering Will's daily letters under Iris James' watchful eye. As Iris starts to take Emma's welfare to heart, a letter arrives from Will's landlady in London, bringing the worst kind of news. Despite her fervant belief in the sanctity of the post office credo, Iris decides to hide the letter from Emma. But yet another letter exists, this one being held by Frankie who meets Will in an Underground station after a night of bombing. Will either of these letters ever find their way to Emma?
Sarah Blake's voyage into the lives of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary times is more than the story of a husband, a wife, a postmistress and a radio broadcaster. Sarah ably conveys the atmosphere of wartime, where the adrenaline rush of staying alive can make some wish the war would never end. But when friends and familiar faces fail to show up and the death toll mounts, those left behind must find ways to cope with these continuous loses. And, as Frankie discovers, unlike the randomness of war in London, which strikes down civilains and soldiers with no discernable pattern, the war in other parts of Europe contains a much more systematic and meticulously planned carnage - to mobilize and move all of European Jewry into ghettos, work camps, and utlimate death, as the Nazi regime begins it's implentation of a greater Aryan world.
I highly recommend this book. Sarah Blake has found a private and intimate voice for the horrors of World War Two, which does much more to bring the reality of loss to the reader than any list of casualties and deaths could convey. For more information on the author, and to listen to the author share her inspiration for the story, you can link to Sarah Blake's website, at http://www.sarahblakebooks.com/
