One of my favorite historical fiction authors, Lauren Willig, has done it again; serving up a doozy of a tale to delight and engross me. A strong stand-alone book, TWO WARS AND A WEDDING has loose ties to BAND OF SISTERS, but no prior Willig experience is needed to dive in and glory in the juicy novel that is TWO WARS AND A WEDDING. This is an epic saga of war and hardship, courage and love.
Willig gives us a dual timeline with a singular heroine. Smith College graduate Betsy Hayes is a true delight. She’s a headstrong feminist who’s fighting the strictures of 1896 in her pursuit of becoming an archeologist. She travels to Athens where she tries to force into the male bastion of excavators, butting heads with the men around her as she tries desperately to pursue her dream. Betsy gets pulled into support for the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish War, and falls into a seemingly ill-advised job of nursing. Against all odds, Betsy displays competence and grit at her new post, and it’s so moving to see her change for the better.
Two years later, the Spanish-American War begins, and Willig’s depiction of this is heartbreaking. A traumatized Betsy was broken by her horrific experiences in Greece, then rushes to Cuba to try to find her estranged best friend Ava who volunteered to nurse in the Spanish-American War. Betsy desperately fights once again to save the soldiers under her care, and wow, what a moving saga that entails.
Betsy is a delicious protagonist. She’s conflicted and impetuous, yet to watch her grow enormously as a person and start to fight for what’s right instead of her empty passions is a beautiful thing to watch. Betsy’s heart breaks over and over in her relationships, and I rooted so hard for her to repair her broken friendships and find new love. The backdrops of the two wars are brutal and all too real, but the most compelling portions of the story involve the strong characters who march through these war landscapes. Willig’s TWO WARS AND A WEDDING is a moving epic of heartache and war that will reverberate in my thoughts.
From New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig: a dramatic coming-of-age story with a dual timeline and a single heroine—a bold and adventuring young woman who finds herself caught up in two very different wars on both sides of the Atlantic.
September 1896: An aspiring archaeologist, Smith College graduate Betsy Hayes travels to Athens, desperate to break into the male-dominated field of excavation. In the midst of the heat and dust of Greece she finds an unlikely ally in Charles, Baron de Robecourt, one of the few men who takes her academic passion seriously. But when a simmering conflict between Greece and Turkey erupts into open warfare, Betsy throws herself into the conflict as a nurse, not knowing that the decision will change her life forever—and cause a deep and painful rift with her oldest friend, Ava.
June 1898: Betsy has sworn off war nursing—but when she gets the word that her estranged friend Ava is headed to Cuba with Clara Barton and the Red Cross to patch up the wounded in the Spanish-American War, Betsy determines to stop her the only way she knows how: by joining in her place. Battling heat, disease, and her own demons, Betsy follows Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders straight to the heart of the fighting, where she is forced to confront her greatest fears to save both old friends and new….
Set during an electrifying era of nation-building, idealism, and upheaval, Two Wars and a Wedding is the tale of two remarkable women striving to make their place in a man’s world—an unforgettable saga of friendship, love, and fighting for what is right.
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