The Winter Soldier

Mason, Daniel. The Winter Soldier. New York: Little, Brown. 2018. Print

First Sentences:

They were five hours east of Debrecen when the train came to a halt before the station on the empty plain.

There was no announcement, not even a whistle. Were it not for the snow-draped placard, he wouldn't have known they had arrived....He was the only passenger to descend.

Description:

World War I serves as the background for many novels which present battles, trenches, military leadership, and footsoldiers in great detail. But in my opinion, no novel rivals Daniel Mason's The Winter Soldier for a character study of one man, a doctor, and his struggles to repair the men sent to him from the battlefields while he harbors dreams of pursuing medical fame and new discoveries.

Lucius is a twenty-two year old medical student in Vienna in 1914, a devoted researcher and learner, eager to take a position in a reputable hospital and do great works. But when World War I arrives, he enthusiastically offers his services to the military, hoping for an appointment to a field hospital and a chance to follow in the footsteps of his wealthy, militaristic father.

Instead, Lucus is sent to a tiny outpost in the mountains of Hungary, just a broken down church which serves as a makeshift hospital. His job is to patch up and keep alive terribly wounded soldiers and make them stable enough to be transported to a better-equiped facility. When Lucius arrives, the church/hospital has recently been overrun by a typhus outbreak, scaring off all its doctors who fled to safer locations. All that is left of the staff is Sister Margarete, a knowledgable, efficient woman who is silent about her earlier life.

She trains Lucius, still just an inexperienced student who has never even treated a patient, in everything from how to amputate limbs to perform surgery under impossible conditions. Together they begin to create some semblance of order and begin administering medical assistance to the wounded in an organized manner.

But one patient who is wheeled into their hospital is a man almost catatonic, not speaking or moving. Jozsef proves a unique challange, a magnificient triumph, and a disasterous failure to Lucius and Sister Margarete. The man becomes a turning point in Lucius' education in both medicine and wartime brutality when a military officer comes to the hospital looking to comandeer any able-bodied men to return to the battlefields.

Author Mason brings us readers deeply into the mind of Lucius as his dreams of medical glory face the reality of a bitter cold in an isolated church/hospital doing emergency surgery. He finds himself curiously attracted to Sister Margarete and tries to uncover her background story but to no avail.

So there it is. A story that brilliantly depicts the life of one single man and the individuals he encounters in a bitterly cold Hungarian outpost during World War I. It's engrossing, sobering, and unpredictable to the very last page. Highly recommended.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Shreve, Anita. Stella Bain.  

Stella Bain awakens in a field hospital tent somewhere in France during World War I. She has no memory of any previous existence, so stays on at the make-shift hospital as a nurse. Extraordinary character study and historical depiction of war and medicine. (previously reviewed here)

Dead Wake

Larson, Erik. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. New York: Crown. 2015. Print.

First Sentences:

The smoke from ships and the exhalations of the river left a haze that blurred the world and made the big liner seem even bigger, less the product of human endeavor than an escarpment rising from a plain. 

The hull was black; seagulls flew past in slashes of white, pretty now, not yet the objects of horror they would become, later, for the man standing on the ship's bridge, seven stories above the wharf.

Description:

While many of us may have vague knowledge of the (spoiler alert) sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915, how many can say exactly what lead up to this event, what people were involved, and what impact this had on World War I? Who can name any famous person aboard on that fateful trip? Why was the Lusitania such an important vessel to the Americans, British, and Germans alike? And finally what happened to its passengers, crew, captain, and even the German U-Boat commander after the Lusitania went down?

Each of these interesting questions is answered in Erik Larson's newest non-fiction historical work, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. Using diaries, interviews, newspaper accounts, and de-coded radio messages from Germans and British, Larson tells the details of the people (American, British, and German alike) and events leading up to the voyage, the sinking, and the aftereffects of that ship's disaster.

Dead Wake consists of three intertwined stories: the last voyage of the Lusitania with its crew and passengers; the German U-Boat 20 and its commander and crew; and the personal trials of President Woodrow Wilson who had recently experienced the death of his wife and was plagued by uncertainty about the War. Moving smoothly between these three perspectives, Dead Wake continually fascinates as it reveals motivations and actions of each story until they collide one fateful day.

On May 1, 1915, the Lusitania set out from New York for London carrying 1,265 passengers, including 123 Americans. Captained by William Turner, she was the greatest ship of her time according to one passenger:

The Lusitania...is in itself a perfect epitome of all that man knows or has discovered or invented up to this moment of time.

No one aboard, including Turner, felt the voyage would be anything but uneventful. Despite warnings from Kaiser Wilhelm himself to the shipbuilders not to travel into wartime waters, the passengers and crew of the Lusitania were confident that, at 25 knots, the Lusitania could outrun or ram any enemy submarine which dared attack a fully-loaded passenger liner, an action they deemed "beyond rational consideration." Although the crew practiced lifeboat drills and watched for tell-tale submarine periscope wakes, the wealthy passengers were not to be disturbed by mandatory participation in such activities.

Meanwhile, aboard the German submarine U-boat 20, Captain Walther Schwieger had complete freedom to roam the waters around England and sink whatever ship he desired in order to break the British blockage and stop the flow of troops and supplies to England. Even ships flying neutral country flags were targeted since false colors often were used by enemies in hopes of fooling U-boats. Larson follows Schwieger and his crew in their life aboard U-boat 20 as they sink ship after ship with neither the traditional warning to abandon ship nor assistance to survivors. 

The events Larson reveals leading up to the deadly meeting between U-20 and the Lusitania are fascinating, including:

• Part of the cargo for the Lusitania included 157 barrels of candy, oil paintings of Rubens, Monet, Titian, and Rembrandt worth $92 million today, and 1,250 cases of shrapnel-laden artillery shells and powder bound for the British army; 

• The British Admiralty and their ultra-secret Room 40 division of code-breakers actually had a copy of the German code book and were able to read German correspondence from U-boats to German command headquarters. They knew where U-boats were, but were reluctant to act on this information to protect ships and reveal they had broken the German codes;

• The Lusitania shut down one of its four engine throughout the voyage to conserve coal, thus reducing its overall speed and placing it near U-20 on the fated day rather than arriving in London two days earlier before the submarine was in the area;

• Evasive maneuvers by the Lusitania were avoided because "subjecting passengers, many of them prominent souls in first class, to the hard and irregular turns of a zigzag course were beyond contemplation;"

• Although the sinking of the Lusitania supposedly pushed the US from a neutral position to actually entering into World War I, it actually was over two years between those two events. 

The actual sinking is transfixing to read. Using personal accounts of survivors and official reports, Larson presents eye-witness details that recall passengers calmly watching the torpedo approach the Lusitania, the swiftness of the boat going down due to open portholes (filling interiors with "an estimated 260 tons of water per minute"), heroes who helped passengers correctly put on life jackets (many drowned due to wearing mis-adjusted preservers), and the tearful reunification of separated survivors. 

Riveting, exciting, breath-taking, sorrowful, eye-opening ... what other words can I use to describe the feeling when reading this page-turning account? Highly recommended for its clarifying history of events, its writing, and the captivating details of life in the early twentieth century of the wealthy class, the naval forces, and warring governments during this period. Wonderful!

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

In-depth research brings this non-fiction account of the origins, daily workings, social conditions, and conclusions about World War I to vivid life. Great insight into the major and minor people of this war from military to political to social figures. Highly recommended.  (previously reviewed here)

Larson, Erik. Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Powerful, all-encompassing read about the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, intertwined with the development of the new downtown Chicago skyline at that time and the architect who designed it. But also lurking is the true account of the grisly murders that took place at the same time just outside the fair. As always, Larson is the master of detail and personalities, weaving them together with his smooth writing to make a reader feel he/she is actually a part of the fair, the murders, and the investigation of that era.

West With the Night

Markham, Beryl. West With the Night. New York : Heinemann . 1936. Print.

First Sentences:

How is it possible to bring order out of memory?

I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, "This is the place to start; there can be no other."

But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names -- Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakuru..

Description:

Beryl Markham's  West With the Night is a quietly stunning memoir about her life growing up on a racehorse-training stable in British East Africa in the early 1900s. Markham is best known as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west (the opposite direction as Lindbergh), but this feat only accounts for one chapter of her memories.

The writing is what makes this book unforgettable, painting a spare picture of her world of lions, wild boar hunting with Murani (Masai) warriors, a fearless dog, horses, and airplane flights across trackless Africa during World War I. 

Markham's narrative is a stream of consciousness recollection of events and people in her childhood. Opening with the memory of the seemingly fruitless search in her bi-plane for a lost pilot, she interweaves comments on the landscape, animals, the deadly blackwater plague that wracks another man she encounters, and her description of the silence felt where she eventually finds the missing pilot's plane:

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is a silence that comes with morning in the forest, and this is different from  the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt...Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

She makes a brief reference to a lion attack in another memory which leads to re-telling the attack she suffered as a child. This evolves into the tale of her dog surviving a nighttime abduction and ensuing fight with a leopard which incredibly left the deadly cat as bad off from the encounter as the dog:

[The dog] recovered, after ten months' tedious nursing, and became the same Buller again -- except that his head had lost what little symmetry it ever had and cat-killing developed from a sport to a vocation.

She calmly tells of the dangerous boar hunt with Murani men when only a young girl, hefting her own spear to kill one huge boar that was attacking her dog. Later, during an elephant hunt, she relates the harrowing experience of facing, without a rifle, a huge charging bull elephant.

After drought forces her family farm to ruin, she begins a new life alone at age 18 as a race-horse trainer. Starting off with not much more than the clothes on her back and her horse, she eventually builds up a respected stable of thoroughbreds to race in Nairobi and on other tracks in Africa and abroad. 

She learns the skills to pilot a bi-plane in order to avoid "roads" in that environment that are treacherous and rocky at best, and starts another life delivering goods by plane throughout the uncharted lands of East Africa. This leads to her famous, hugely dangerous solo flight from England to New York in 1932. Your heart is in your throat as she braves the dangers of night flying over the Atlantic, switching over to new fuel tanks when the engine dies and has to point the plane's nose straight down to the ocean to force start it. The first time she was less than 300 feet above the ocean when the motor finally started. Unbelievable.

There is too much of her life that Markham leaves out of West With the Night to make it a true memoir, but what she selects to write about is powerful and modest at the same time. Her respect for the culture and people of Africa shines on each page as she describes the ceremonies and interactions she has with them. Absolutely fascinating stories with beautiful, spare writing makes this memoir a gem. Highly recommended.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Markham, Beryl. The Splendid Outcast

Eight stories by Markham posthumously collected about her life in Africa and passion for airplanes, horses, and men. With West With the Night, these are (unfortunately) the only published writings of Markham and they are great.

Lovell, Mary S. Straight On Til Morning: The Life of Beryl Markham

I haven't read this yet, but am very curious to follow up on the story of Beryl Markham's life as she left so many details out of West With the Night, particularly her three marriages,affairs with Denys Finch Hatten, Tom Black, and various British crown heirs, friendship with Karen Blixen, and life after her famous flight, including the question of authorship of West With the Night..

Fifth Business

Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. New York: Viking Penguin. 1970. Print.

First Sentences:

My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

I am able to date the occasion with complete certainty because that afternoon I had been sledding with my lifelong friend and enemy Percy Boyd Staunton, and we had quarreled, because his fine new Christmas sled would not go as fast as my old one.

Description:

Can one describe the excitement of stumbling upon a new author, a great book, and the promise of more titles because the original book is part in a trilogy? I can't, but will try to give you part of the enthusiasm I felt while reading Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, the first novel in his turn-of-the-century Deptford trilogy.

Set in the tiny town of Deptford, Canada, Fifth Business is a personal history told by Dunstan Ramsay, a history teacher in a private boy's school who is retiring after 45 years of service. After a weak tribute article about Ramsay's life appeared, he decides to write a letter to the headmaster to set the record straight on his life story. Fifth Business is the lengthy letter that results.

The plot and subsequent actions over his lifetime revolve around one incident when Ramsay dodged a snowball thrown by his much richer friend/enemy, Percy Boyd Staunton. The snowball, loaded with a stone, hit the pregnant wife of a local parson, causing her to fall, give premature birth to a son, Paul, and then go slowly, quietly insane.

Ramsay is assigned by his mother to look in on this addled woman and her tiny son every day over the next years, becoming friends with both. Mrs. Dempsey proves an interesting listener and kind companion, and Paul becomes an eager student for Ramsay to teach minor magic tricks to. All is well until Mrs. Dempsey participates in a scandalous act that shocks the small town and drives this group of friends apart.

When Ramsay leaves to serve in World War I, he provides an honest description of service for an ordinary soldier in a war:

I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.

I was bored as I have never been since - bored till every bone in my body was heavy with it....It was the boredom that comes of being cut off from everything that could make life sweet, or around curiosity, or enlarge the range of the senses. It was the boredom that comes of having to perform endless tasks that have no savour and acquire skills would gladly be without. 

In France, though my boredom was unabated, loneliness was replaced by fear. I was, in a mute, controlled, desperate fashion, frightened for the next three years.

He becomes a hero for one action that is performed during a frightening raid on a machine gun nest. His action results in the loss of his leg and part of an arm, damage that affects the choices his makes throughout the remainder of his story. Meanwhile, Staunton remains home in Canada, building up a fortune in the food industry. 

Upon Ramsay's return, he takes a teaching position at the boys' school he and Staunton attended, even becoming Headmaster during World War II while Staunton chairs their board of directors. Paul has meanwhile disappeared from Deptford, but Ramsay stumbles upon him in rural France performing a wonderful magic act for an otherwise broken-down circus.

It is the writing that pulls these seemingly connected, yet separate lives together. Author Davies captures the mind and phrasing perfectly of a history professor and researcher in the early 1900s, a man who seems open about his actions but holds many secrets. 

The story is full of unique characters, from magicians to fool/saints, soldiers to professors, lovers and hobos, and rural townspeople with their prejudices and beliefs. All are influences on Ramsay's life, both for good or evil. Ramsay himself, in the telling of his story, looks for causes of his current status and his own inner being.

One always learns one's mystery at the price of ones innocence.

I cannot recommend this highly enough for those like me not familiar with Robertson Davies. And personally I cannot wait to read the other two novels in the trilogy (The Manticore and World of Wonders). The characters are definitely people I want to follow further.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Davies, Robertson. World of Wonders

Just started reading this and it's a fantastic conclusion to the Fifth Business Deptford trilogy. Narrated by Magnus Eisengrim (Paul Dempster), we hear his story about how he became a magician as he talks with an eminent film director filming him for a Robert-Houdin project. Of course, Dunstan Ramsay is along to observe and record their discussions about magic, people, life struggles, and the Devil. Wonderfully written, great characters, and absorbing plot.

Gold, Glen David. Carter Beats the Devil

Based on the real life of Charles Carter, a magician who performed before President Warren Harding who died later that night under suspicious conditions. Fantastic details of the man and his magic. One of my favorite books of all time. (previously reviewed here)

To Serve Them All My Days

Delderfield, R.F.. To Serve Them All My Days. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1972. Print

First Sentences:

The guard at Exeter warned him he would have to change at Dulverton to pick up the westbound train to Bamfylde Bridge Halt, the nearest railhead to the school, but did not add that the wait between trains was an hour..

It was one of those trivial circumstances that played a part in the healing process of the years ahead, for the interval on that deserted platform, set down in a rural wilderness, and buttresses by heavily timbered hills where spring lay in ambush, gave Powlett-Jones an opportunity to focus his thoughts in a way he had been unable to do for months, since the moment he had emerged from the dugout and paused, rubbing sleep from his eyes, to glance left and right down the trench.

Description:

When I started The First Sentence Reader blog, it was to share books I love that might not be familiar to other readers. One book in particular, R.F. Delderfield's  To Serve Them All My Days, was one that I most wanted resurrect and recommend to anyone seeking a great book full of strong characters, enveloping plot, and of course, wonderful writing.

In its first pages we are introduced to Second Lieutenant David Powlett-Jones, a shell-shocked World War I survivor looking to start his life over as a teacher in Bamfylde, a quiet boys school in England. He is taken under the wing by the personable headmaster, Algernon Herries. Under Algy's friendship and encouragement, Powlett-Jones begins to settle in to Bamfylde and push his memories of the trenches of World War I behind him.

Powlett-Jones has never taught school before, much less in a prestigious boarding school of young privileged men. This is the tale of a man growing and maturing just as his young students grow and mature. PJ is initially assigned to teach modern history to the Lower Fourth, the dreaded fifteen-year-olds who are old hands at the school, yet far enough away from graduation that they felt no pressure to apply themselves to work or discipline. 

PJ survives their attempts to test his authority and the boys gradually become engrossed in his stories about life in the military. He is willing to explain to them the realities of the world and motivations of countries that brought about the current War. This conflict is close to the hearts of the boys as it continues to take the lives of Bamfyld graduates they knew and whose deaths are noted in a weekly ceremony. 

The rest of the teaching staff are slow to warm to Powlett-Jones as they are so far removed from his real world of military experience, but at the same time are his superiors for their years of teaching. From Howarth, the "dry old stick" English professor, to Carter, the gung-ho patriot who feels himself a military expert after six months as a Territorial officer, they seem an odd lot to Powlett-Jones in his new environment.

The chapters unfold with new adventures to challenge and delight the residents of this school. Year after year we watch Powlett-Jones face situations concerning the young boys, staff, and himself with the calm logic and reasonableness that define his character of strength and goodness. There are some great characters in literature and David Powlett-Jones can hold his own with any of them.

It is this interaction, this self-growth, and this atmosphere of learning, both academic and personal, that makes To Serve Them All My Days the masterpiece of writing it is. Powlett-Jones and all the other residents of Bamfyld are such wonderful characters, so full of honor, spirit, and love that one cannot help but be thoroughly involved in their lives in this small school. 

It is a rather long novel (625 pages), so the opening sentences may not be the grabbers of other books reviewed here. But these sentences perfectly reflect the languid, detailed style of the author. And "rather long" is not such a bad description for a novel. In my opinion, a great "rather long" book is one that, when you finish reading it, you are hoping for even more chapters that will allow you to spend more time in this world and its inhabitants (e.g. Gone With the Wind, War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, and A Life of Barbara Stanwyck). 

To Serve Them All My Days can take its rightful place in this illustrious group. And when you do reach its final pages, I guarantee you will regret the closing of the door to this world of Bamfyld and wish there were at least a few more chapters to prolong your time with Powlett-Jones and his charges. To Serve Them All My Days leaves you wanting more. Is there any better evaluation for a book?

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Codell, Esme. Educating Esme

Diary of a first year teacher's experiences in inner city school. Unusual in her unique, quirky, compassionate methods to reach the children and help them as students and people, the book details her exhaustive efforts to overcome forgotten children and an admiration that does not support her new techniques. (previously reviewed here)

Herriott, James. All Creatures Great and Small

Similar coming of professional age of a newly graduated veterinarian in the rural Yorkshire Dales, learning as he goes of the people, the animals, and the land. Wonderfully written with humor and great relationships between the author, his boss, and the local farmers.

The Steady Running of the Hour

Go, Justin. The Steady Running of the Hour. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2014. Print

First Sentences:

The letter came by courier last week.

I knew when I touched the envelope that it was fine stationery. I knew from the paper, the porous surface of pure cotton rag; the watermark that shone though as I held it to the light. The letter is in my bag in the overhead compartment, but I imagine the cream fibers, the feel of the engraved letterhead.

Description:

Ashley Walsingham was a mountain climber killed in an attempt to scale Mt. Everest in 1924. Before he departed for the climb he re-wrote his will to leave his fortune to Imogen Soames-Andersson, a woman he had met for one brief week but had not seen for seven years. But after his death she cannot be found to give her with the vast bequeath. 

Now, after 80 years, the estate is still unclaimed and the trust is to be distributed to other charities. Tristan Campbell receives a letter from the Walsingham Trust lawyers. They have a vague idea that Tristan might be the last remaining heir to the estate in trust from 1924. Tristan has only a few weeks to prove his direct link to Walsingham to claim the inheritance. Thus begins to search into the lives of Ashley and Imogen, their correspondence, Walsingham's life as a World War I combatant and mountain climber, and Imogen's life after his death.

Justin Go proves himself an able story-teller and romanticist in his debut novel The Steady Running of the Hour. This book has something for everyone: a passionate romance between two young lovers; a mystery that follows tenuous links to murky speculations; an epistolary correspondence between star-crossed lovers; realistic descriptions of the soldiers and conditions of World War I; and bone-chilling details about the assent on Mt. Everest.

It is a twisting tale combining Tristan's search for any information about these two lovers. Starting with only a few of their letters, he travels to their English homes, the battlefields of France, and an isolated village in Iceland, looking for clues that might answer critical questions: Could they somehow be his great-great grandparents? How did they meet? What happened when Ashley went away to war? What didn't Imogen ever claim the estate? Is their romance truly love or just the longing of youth?

Even love can sometimes be a mistake, and perhaps this vanished love of Ashley and Imogen's had been a wasted one ... Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between love and longing, but they are not at all the same thing, and while one is worth very much, the other is always wasted.

Chapters alternate between Tristan's present day search and the actions of Ashley and Imogen 80 years earlier. Readers are privy to both the desperate research and travels of Tristan as well as the star-crossed relationship of Ashley and Imogen, their conversations, correspondence, and lives together and apart. All actions, conversations, and situations are carefully, wonderfully detailed until you understand and care deeply about each of these characters. And wonder what will be the conclusions to each of their lives.

Along the way, Tristan gradually becomes less interested in his stake in the inheritance and is more driven to understand these two lovers. And as he searches, his life and decisions begin to take on a similarity to those of Ashley in pursuit of goals and relationships with women.

I don't feel sorry for them. However badly things went for Ashley, I bet you anything he wouldn't have traded his life for mine. They knew what they cared about, both of them. Even if they lost it, at least they knew.

Will Tristan find the answers in the time remaining? Will the information confirm his lineage to Ashley and Imogen and the fortune that awaits him as the heir? The book keeps you guessing until the final pages, and even then it produces several unexpected surprises. One has to love a story that is unpredictable to the very end, so completely engrossing you in the story and characters that you arrive breathless at the end, take a minute to digest the outcome, then want to start reading it all over again.

A wonderfully-written, beautiful love story and challenging mystery full of interesting characters, story twists, and, of course, adventure and passion. Highly recommended.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Brockmole, Jessica. Letters from Skye: A Novel

Correspondence between a young college man who enters World War I and a quiet poet living on the Isle of Skye. Beautifully written, passionate, and tragic at once. (previously reviewed here)

Shreve, Anita. Stella Bain

A woman awakes in a World War I hospital in France, with no memory of her name, her past, or what she is doing in the battlefield. As she searches for her identity, she meets one man who might change her life. (previously reviewed here)

Stella Bain

Shreve, Anita. Stella Bain. New York: Little, Brown. 2013. Print

First Sentences:

Sunrise glow through canvas panels. 

Foul smell of gas gangrene. Men moaning all around her. Pandemonium and chaos.

She floats inside a cloud. Cottony, a little dingy. Pinpricks of light summon her to wakefulness. She drifts, and then she sleeps.

Description:

So wakes the heroine of Anita Shreve's' Stella Bain, in a French military field hospital during World War I. She is wearing a Voluntary Aid Detachment uniform, has minor shrapnel wounds on her feet, but is otherwise untouched ... except she has no memory of anything prior to her awakening.

No one else in the hospital knows who she is either or where she came from as she was dropped off in the middle of the night by someone with a cart. Even her name is a mystery. "Stella Bain" is a guess she feels sounds right to her and she takes it, but she is far from certain of this or anything else.

So who is she? With her American accent, what is she doing in France prior to the United States entry into the War? How did she get injured? And what will she do now?

Over the next weeks, vague pictures come into her mind and she is able to sketch them: a small garden; a broken-down cottage surrounded by ominous trees of a forest; a half-completed face of a man; and another man much more ominous. The significance of these pictures, even where she gained her ability to draw, remains unknown.

She does sense that she was once an ambulance driver, so takes on this dangerous responsibility for the field hospital while she tries to remember something, anything. 

Then, she overhears a word, "Admiralty," which seems somehow familiar to her. During a leave, she feels it important to catch a transport to England in search of this place. But sickness overtakes her and the quest for the Admiralty and her memory (and name) must wait as she recovers in the home of a stranger and his family.

Stella Bain is a quiet, spare story made compelling by the strong personality of the narrator and her struggles to learn anything about her life prior to the field hospital. Sentences are short, and the tone is almost whispered even with the background of war and survival. The slowly unfolding mystery, the characters who play roles in her former life and those who try to help her, and the setting of France and England during the Great War each tug at readers with their hints of a much, much bigger picture.  

This book is quietly compelling. It is never heavy-handed nor violent, but calm, collected, and so fascinating that it is very difficult to put aside. The bits and pieces of Stella's life tantalize her in their incompleteness like the beginning stages of a large jigsaw puzzle. To her, the first steps are impossibly hard, but somehow she retains hopes the puzzle (and her life) will become more clear and the pieces start to fall together. That is the hope of Stella.

Highly recommended for those who love mysteries, strong characters, love, and even the realities of World War I and the effects it has on soldiers, volunteers, and civilians.


Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918  

Highly detailed and well-written history of the causes, daily decisions, personalities, and outcomes of World War I. (Previously reviewed here).

Brockmole, Jessica. Letters from Skye: A Novel  

Series of fictionalized, sensitive letters written between a young student and World War I soldier from America, and a recluse poet from the Isle of Skye. (Previously reviewed here). 

Letters from Skye

Brockmole, Jessica. Letters from Skye. New York: Ballantine. 2013. Print

First Sentences:

Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A
March 5, 1912

Dear Madam,

I hope you won't think me forward, but I wanted to write to express my admiration for your book, From an Eagle's Aerie. I'll admit, I'm not usually a guy for poetry. More often, I can be found with a dog-eared copy of Huck Finn or something else involving mortal peril and escape. But something in your poems touched me more than anything has in years.

Description:

Thus starts the epistolary relationship between a college student in Illinois and an obscure poet living on the Isle of Skye. Their letters over the next thirty years compose the gentle love story found in Jessica Brockmole's debut novel, Letters from Skye.

David Graham and Elspeth Dunn had never met prior to his first fan letter. He comes across her book of poetry while recovering in the hospital from a college prank gone wrong. She, receiving his first letter via her publisher, is genuinely surprised that one of her "humble little works have fled as far as America."

Their letters begin hesitatingly, sharing thoughts about writing, their own very different worlds, and their interests. We as readers are privy to their innermost, private thoughts. She confesses to playing a coronet and having a secret longing to study geology, while he loves dancing and "painting the dean's horse blue." 

They are innocents, giddy over this new friendship with someone from such a foreign homeland. They do not know where these letters will take them as they reveal more and more about themselves and their words, but the correspondence continues regularly as they warm to their topics and to each other.

But soon the War comes and their correspondence changes.  Their letters are discovered by others close to them with sad consequences for both writers. This becomes a relationship that cannot endure, and David and Elspeth face a reality that is not expected.

A second story also plays out in the novel via a series of letters written in the 1940s between a mother and her daughter. Margaret, the daughter, has run away to be with her own "pen friend," a soldier recovering from wounds and soon heading off to rejoin the fight against the Germans during World War II. We read letters between mother and daughter detailing surviving bombings of London and the problems with loving a soldier. Again, their correspondence reveals more and more about these two women who, unlike David and Elspeth, seem to protect their secrets rather than reveal their personal histories. 

This is a delicate book of words, of wonderful language from an era where people wrote what they felt, played with phrases, and delighted in nicknames and jokes private to the correspondents. That people can communicate, grow a relationship, and even fall in love through letters without ever meeting or seeing a photo seems quaint today. But in the hands of a skilled writer like Brockmole, words in the letters exchanged between Elspeth and David have life and honesty in their passion and urgent desire to communicate with one another on an intimate basis.

I fell in love with my wife via the letters we exchanged over the course of a year between our homes in the United States and India, so I know personal relationships between ordinary writers such as Elspeth and David are possible and can produce a great love. Twenty-eight years later, my wife and I still write to each other, whether cards for special occasions, emails when we are apart, or notes on our kitchen blackboard. 

Letters from Skye is a special book, a beautiful, secret look into the world of two young people who meet, fall in love, and deal with the consequences of this relationship -- all through their letters. A wonderful way to spend a few hours reading, peaking into the lives of these charming people and feeling the genuine warmth of true friendship and passion found in these letters.

Happy reading. 


Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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