In all these post-World War II stories, the main characters come to grips with changes that transform their lives, from the relative security of “normal everyday women” to those threatened by or trying to escape their past, to those caught in a life-threatening political turmoil. In changes small or profound, they must find their way to a better future.
We start with “normal life” in Marie Bostwick’s THE BOOK CLUB FOR TROUBLESOME WOMEN. Living in a lovely neighborhood in a fine home with a loving family, 1960s Concordia housewife Margaret Ryan has everything she’s supposed to want. When intriguing new neighbor Charlotte Gustafson moves to the area, Margaret engineers a book club to become better acquainted. Their first choice, Betty Friedan’s THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, sparks Charlotte and friends Bitsy and Viv to examine more closely what they want out of life—challenging them to question the status quo and societal expectations, inspiring “the Bettys” to find their own voices. Bostwick masterfully recreates the period when women more fully discovered the power of female bonds and began pushing the limits of their “expected” roles.
We turn from the safety of suburbia to the dangers of post-World War II Germany in THE GERMAN HEIRESS by Anika Scott. Daughter of a German family who owned a huge iron works that, during the war, used as workers prisoners sent by the Nazis from detention camps, Clara Falkenberg returns to her home to find the city in ruins and herself sought by a British officer determined to arrest her for war crimes. Amid the destruction and poverty, Clara struggles to stay alive, trying to elude detection by her pursuer while searching for her missing friend Elisa with the help of black marketeer Jakob. In this grim setting, Clara begins to piece together more of the truth about the war and the responsibility she carries for her part in it. Dismissing easy answers, Scott’s book raises hard questions about the meaning of justice and morality in a time when German industrialists were trapped by their government to participate in a system they hadn’t created and couldn’t change.
In RUSSIAN WINTER by Daphne Kalotay, we alternate between present day and immediate post-World War II Russia. Now 79, Nina Revskaya, a former prima ballerina known as “The Butterfly,” is auctioning off her extensive amber jewelry collection and donating the proceeds to the Boston Ballet. Interacting with her is auctioneer Drew Brooks, who while preparing the sales catalogue, delves into the history—and mystery--of the jewelry’s origin. Also participating is Grigori Solodin, a professor of Russian studies who is donating jewelry—which may have ties to Nina. While Nina, Drew and Grigori talk in the present, Nina’s voice takes us into the past, where in the midst of Stalin’s pogroms and purges, she tried to ignore the danger and concentrate on her dancing, as around her the stoic Russian people bore the bitter reality and waited for better times. Eventually, Nina left her poet husband and defected to the West. Kalotay’s novel gives us wonderful glimpses into the world of ballet and into the closed society of Stalin’s Russia, where people cut off from the outside world endure because they know nothing else.
We end with the Berlin Butterfly Series, Book 1: ENSNARED by Leah Moyes, which captures the desperate and dramatic time when the Soviet overlords of East Germany used their communist surrogates to close down the border and trap the entire population with the construction of the Berlin Wall. Fifteen-year-old Ella Kuhn must make the impossible choice between escaping to freedom with her younger brother and her best friend Anton before the wall is finished or remain to care for her dying father. Trapped in the closed city after her father’s death, she’s forced to work for two years for the wealthy and influential Frankes family to pay the debt she owes them for paying her father’s funeral expenses. Her work with them brings her into contact with the high-placed Party members her employers entertain, while their son alternately repels and intrigues her. Ever foremost in her mind is the desire to escape East Berlin and find her brother and Anton—but friendship is risky and the chance of betrayal and death ever-present. Moyes‘s novel creates a vivid picture of what it was like for Ella and the people of East Berlin to live through this tragic life-changing experience. For those intrigued by Ella’s story, Moyes continues it in Berlin Butterfly Series, Book 2: DECEPTION and Berlin Butterfly Series, Book 3: RELEASE.
Whether in safety or in peril, uncovering truths and finding a new vision of the world takes courage and deep introspection. Settle back and travel along as this month’s disparate heroines undertake that journey.
Real, intense, passionate historical romance
Award-winning romance author Julia Justiss, who has written more than thirty historical novels and novellas set in the English Regency and the American West, just completed her first contemporary series set in the fictional Hill Country town of Whiskey River, Texas.
A voracious reader who began jotting down plot ideas for Nancy Drew novels in her third grade spiral, Julia has published poetry and worked as a business journalist.
She and her husband live in East Texas, where she continues to craft the stories she loves. Check her website for details about her books, chat with her on social media, and follow her on Bookbub and Amazon to receive notices about her latest releases.
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