Wow! Maybe I've just been reading some duds lately, but this one rang the bell. Thank you, my friend and fellow reader, for loaning it to me. I started it next because I wanted to finish it and return it - borrowed books always make me nervous, what with cats and my habit of spilling things - but it has been a long time since I enjoyed anything so much. I had to buy the kindle version for two reasons - so I could read faster - and so that I own the book. I may present this to the other book club when it gets around to my turn again.
It starts out as the story of a middle-aged woman, the rather down-trodden daughter of a Southern (with a capital "S") Belle, but it is all placed on a story of the WASPs. It is one of the best WWII stories I have ever read, about one of the most overlooked passages in the entire war. The WASPs were finally recognized and granted status as veterans in 1977, thirty-three years after they were told "Thanks, but now go away and pretend this organization never existed." There are still many who have no idea what those women did - and others who still want to pretend it never happened.
The United States has a long history of ignoring inconvenient history. In women's issues, we do now read about the valiant suffragettes who fought for votes for women - but our histories seldom mention that the US was one of the last western nations to grant women the vote. And in this case, I have known about the WASPs for most of my life, but I didn't know that women were flying military aircraft in Europe for quite some time before the US military was driven to it in desperation. Many of those brave boys who got the glory and veteran's benefits were trained by women, thirty-eight of whom died in the service of an ingloriously ungrateful nation.
But the story is built in true Fannie Flagg style. Both time periods are peopled with wonderful characters and engaging events. The connections gradually develop throughout the parallel stories. Often I find switching between time periods or narrators somewhat jarring, but I was totally involved with both sets of characters and events; even when I wanted to know what happened next in the story in front of me, I was happy to find out what was going on in the other story line. Even when Flagg threw in one last twist, it worked.
Only Flagg could have taken the story of a southern woman in small town Alabama recovering from the weddings of her three daughters and the story of four sisters in a small Polish community in Wisconsin who take over the running of the family filling station when their father becomes ill and tied them together so delightfully.
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