The trauma and destruction of war conceals…but over time, almost all secrets are finally revealed. So it is with the quartet of alternating-timeline stories highlighting family dramas that we will look at this month.
We begin with THE SECRETS OF FLIGHT by Maggie Leffler, featuring one of my favorite protagonists—a female flyer! As a young woman, Miri risks everything, denying her family and changing her name to fulfill her dream of being a pilot, eventually flying throughout World War II with the WASPs. Skip to the present, and Miri is now a eighty-seven-year-old widow presiding over a writing group. When fifteen-year-old Elyse Stricker joins the group, her strong resemblance to Miri’s sister Sarah moves Miri to finally want to tell her story. She hires the aspiring teen writer to type it, and as the two delve deeper into the past, a friendship forms, eventually leading them both to discover the deeper meaning of family, the healing quality of forgiveness and the truth that it is never too late for a second chance.
WHAT THE SILENT SAY by Emerson Ford depicts World War II on the homefront and the battlefield—and secrets revealed years later, the novel based on letters the author discovered from her own grandfather and great-uncle. Raymond Sellers and his brother Jimmie leave South Carolina and Raymond’s wife Evelyn for the war in the Pacific, Raymond to fight on the ground, Jimmie in the air. Throughout the brutal struggle, bonds of blood and the soldiers’ bonds of brotherhood sustain both those facing desperate battles and those on the home front, far from harm but consumed with worry about the men they love who might never come home. Eighteen years after the end of the war, Evelyn’s daughter finds a cache of letters that illuminate this period about which her family seldom speaks, uncovering stories of love, loyalty, courage and sacrifice that highlight how these enduring ties sustained the participants through difficult and dangerous times.
We add a touch of mystery in THE ITALIAN SECRET: A NOVEL by Tara Moss. After returning to Sydney from a stint as a war correspondent, pushed out of journalism by the post-war effort to give returning servicemen back their jobs, Billie Walker decides to reopen her late father’s detective agency. While working on a divorce case for a woman with an abusive husband, Billie finds in her father’s old files letters and money sent to him from Italy. Determined to discover the identity of the mystery correspondent and how she is linked to her family, Billie books passage on the first postwar luxury ship to cross to Italy. But someone doesn’t want her to uncover the connection to a pregnant Irish immigrant girl shipped in shame to Italy in 1910 and a woman in wartime Naples, sheltering from air raids underground in Naples. With determination and panache, Billie must outwit her adversaries and pursue the truth—even though it may upend everything she thought she knew about herself and her family.
Our final selection, PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU by Ellen Feldman, delves into the difficult question of what one is prepared to do to survive—and how to live with the consequences. Alternating between World War II Paris and New York in the 1950’s, we have the story of Charlotte, a widow with a young daughter who works at a Paris bookstore during the Nazi occupation. Given shelter and work in publishing in New York after the war by a former colleague of her father’s, Charlotte is trying to move on with her life…until her now-teenage daughter Vivi, who remembers little about her life before their move to New York, begins asking questions about their past, digging up memories Charlotte would rather keep buried. What is collaboration, what is simple survival, what is excusable, what is immoral? As her daughter forces her to examine the choices she’s made, Charlotte must come to terms with the meaning of family, responsibility, and the cost of survival.
From the backdrop of war to how its secrets simmer over time to affect lives years later, this month’s selection of stories highlight how the power of family, the tenacity of love, and humankind’s stubborn ability to endure can help one hang on to hope and humanity through the bleakest darkness.
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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