I’ll Be Seeing You
By Suzanne Hayes
and Loretta Nyhan
Publisher: Harlequin Mira
Release Date: May 28, 2013
It is mid-January, 1943, when Gloria Whitehall, a
twenty-three-year-old in Rockport, Massachusetts, pregnant with her second
child, writes her first letter to her new pen-pal, Marguerite “Rita” Vincenzo,
an almost forty-one-year-old wife of a biology professor turned Army medic. Glory’s husband is an army staff sergeant in
basic training. Rita’s husband is already in Tunisia, and her eighteen-year-old
son is in basic training with the Navy. The only thing the two women have in
common is their status as military wives in a time of war. They belong to
different generations, different social classes, and different geographical
regions. Glory’s home in Rockport was her parents’ summer home; it is one of
three homes she inherited from them. Rita and her husband Sal are
first-generation Americans from Chicago, Her parents were German immigrants;
his were Italian. Their lifestyle is solidly middle-class.
Yet over the almost three and a half years that these women
exchange letters in which they share their pasts and their present, their fears
and their hopes, their failures and their triumphs, their friends and their
families, a rare and powerful friendship develops. They become a lifeline for
one another, offering through their letters honesty, acceptance, and emotional
sustenance. Their friendship makes both women
braver, wiser, and more resilient. The letters allow the reader to share the
forging of this extraordinary friendship and to meet through Glory and Rita’s
words, and occasionally through others’ letters, the other people who fill
their lives.
I’ll Be Seeing You is an extraordinary book. It brings World War II on the American home front vividly to life. The details that Glory and Rita share remind the reader of the fear and loneliness those left behind experienced, of the terror the sight of a telegram delivery struck in their hearts, and of the courage they displayed by getting on with life and doing all they could for the war effort. The recipes they share show how people coped with rationing, and reminders of the scarcity of everything from women’s stockings to children’s toys demonstrate how war affected every aspect of life.
Most of all, the novel celebrates the power of women’s friendship to strengthen, enrich, and transform the lives of women blessed to find friend of the heart and form bonds of intimacy that bridge all differences of age, class, and place.
This is an extraordinary book, made more so by the fact that
the two women who wrote it did so through correspondence without ever meeting
face-to-face. I love epistolary novels, and this one may be my favorite since
Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies in
1993. If you like women’s fiction that touches the heart and illuminates your
understanding of what it means to live with courage and compassion for others
and for yourself, I highly recommend I’ll
Be Seeing You.
I’m happy to see more books being written about the World
War II era. What historical period would you like to see more of in fiction?
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