This book was one I kind of accidentally just stumbled on. I have been getting into audiobooks lately, and during a visit to my old hometown's local library, this book popped out in the section where they were selling used books. It was 50 cents, which made it a great deal. So I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.
It wound up being a great book!
Now all that said, this is a brutal book. While other fictional accounts of World War II sometimes try to portray some of the stark realities of the war, they often fall back on romanticizing the people involved, and the era. Perhaps even the events themselves, which often take almost a mythical shape, since they now seem to us set in stone.
But in reading this book, you get a very different version of World War II. This book brings alive the uncertainty of what will happen, the shock of not only the biggest events that we all know about from the history books, such as Pearl Harbor, but also brings to life some of the lesser known events from that war. And she really manages to make these events come alive with small details, like mosquitoes and insects and oppressive heat during marches through the jungle, unexpected surrenders with little to no advance warning, all sorts of horrific injuries and diseases which kill off seemingly major characters - or characters who would have been much bigger if they did not fall victim to the events of World War II - are suddenly and mercilessly killed off, but usually not before they suffer a great deal.
This makes you feel a bit like you are seeing the war in real time, instead of reading about some event in the dry, black and white print of books retelling the events of some distant historical events.
Ultimately, this book humanizes the war, if that is possible. It does so by humanizing the people who participated in that war. We see them not taking the war too seriously, seeing it as not even a real war, something that was happening literally and figuratively far away from their own lives. Then we see the impact of Pearl Harbor, and suddenly, the war is no longer far away and not particularly relevant, but dominating every aspect of the lives of the characters in the book.
Without trying to add any spoilers here, we meet two nurses, Jo McMahon and Kay Elliot., who become friends, and then are separated, as they go to two very different theaters of war. Kay is sent to the Pacific, and amazingly, this is seen as a plum assignment at first. After all, there are pam trees and no shortage of sun where Kay is. Indeed, things take a turn for the worse after Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. Eventually, Kay is sent to the Philippines, and is there when the Japanese take over. She loses seemingly everything and everyone close to her, and finds herself in a Japanese POW camp, where she and everyone else inside is starving. She spends the rest of her time in the war there, until they are liberated by Americans.
Meanwhile, Jo is in France, with just a handful of patients. She feels overwhelmed by everything, by what the war has done to her, physically and mentally, to say nothing of her patients. She recognizes that she can control very little about the wider events of the war, so she instead focuses on what little she can do for her six patients, who are near death and starvation themselves. But she does her duty to the best of her ability, sacrificing her own health to try and foster these six back to good health. Her own feelings begin to grow with one of her patients in particular, a Scotsman who is close to death. She cannot understand her own intimate feelings towards this man, who she hardly knows.
Both Jo and Kay meet the love of their lives during the war. Yet, without trying to give anything away, they also both meet with heartbreak before long. The war has taken everytghing from them, and this includes their love. They try to remain in touch with one another, writing letters, even though neither woman can know with any certainty whether or not their letters will ever reach the other.
Nobody is really romanticized in this book. Everyone is very human. The serious flaws and even evil are not conveniently relegated to the enemies, although some of them certainly show some evil as well. And on the other hand, humanity and vulnerability are also not relegated to the Allied army, as we see Jo interacting with a mysterious German soldier who is nothing like the sinister impression she had of German troops in her own imagination. Indeed, nothing is quite as it might seem. This is a brilliant touch by the author, and she manages to handle this challenge very capably
Really, this book pulls no punches, either. Messineo does not romanticize either the war, or the characters that she populates this book with. While some of the characters do indeed win medals, they are not shown displaying overly romanticized notions of war heroism. This is not a comic book version of war. The reader will read descriptions of injuries sustained from the war in all of it’s brutality and will see untimely and often sudden death, and characters unable to fully grasp all of this death and suffering. There will be starvation and internment and setbacks in the war effort.
All of this helps to make this feel like a more accurate portrayal of World War II then most other fictional accounts that this reader has seen in the past. It feels like you are on the ground level and watching events unfold, which is sometimes difficult for a major event like World War II, when many of us have become so familiar with the actual events of the war that they seem set in stone. For example, we all know December 7th, the “day of infamy,” and what it meant. But with this book, we get to glimpse a bit of what it would have been like to have such a massive event take place so unexpectedly, and how truly devastating this attack was, how crippling it had been to the United States Navy in particular.
In the end, I would highly recommend this book. It makes what we perceive as past events into a living history of sorts. Again, it is brutal. It felt a bit like a mixture of an Eric Larson historical fiction account mixed with a version almost of “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo (one of the most powerful antiwar novels know of), mixed with Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” one of the very best war novels ever to be published, while also mixed with the movie “Saving Private Ryan.” Yes, the violence is present, although mostly, we see the aftermath, making it similar to Trumbo’s powerful “Johnny Got His Gun.” We see the effects of the devastating war from the perspective of nurses being brought in an endless and overwhelming number of patients, while also not having nearly enough supplies or personnel to really be able to adequately take care of them. We see the nurses showing real heroism on an everyday level, and not in some action movie version of war heroism. There is no John Wayne here, no Rambo. Just everyday people finding themselves swept up in enormous events in history over which they themselves have very little impact. Yet, they do have an impact to other “little people,” if you will. This is what humanized the book, the absence of larger than life characters.
A great read, and a book that I personally intend to read again in the not too distant future. Very enjoyable, even if it is often grim and depressing. But it feels like an important book, also, if you want to understand the reality of World War II specifically, and war more generally. Indeed, I cannot recommend it enough. It was so good, that I immediately looked into other works by Teresa Messineo. She seems like an author worth looking into and reading again and again.
Do yourself a favor and find a copy of this book!
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