A Star for Mrs. Blake
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Average rating4
"An emotionally-charged, brilliantly realized novel set in the l930's about five American women--Gold Star Mothers--who travel to France to visit the graves of their WWI soldier sons: a pilgrimage that will change their lives in unforeseeable and indelible ways. The women meet for the first time just before their journey begins: Katie, an Irish maid from Dorchester, Massachusetts; Minnie, wife of an immigrant Russian Jewish chicken farmer; Bobbie, a wealthy Boston socialite ; Wilhelmina, a former tennis star in precarious mental health; and Cora Blake, a single mother and librarian from coastal Maine. In Paris, Cora meets a journalist whose drug habit helps him hide from his own war-time fate--facial wounds so grievous he's forced to wear a metal mask. This man will change Cora's life in wholly unexpected ways. And when the women finally travel to Verdun to visit the battlegrounds where their sons fought as well as the cemeteries where they are buried, shocking events -a death, a scandal, a secret revealed--will guarantee that Cora's life and those of her traveling companions will become inextricably intertwined, and only now will they be able to emerge from their grief and return home to their loved ones. This is a timeless story set against a footnote of history: little known but unforgettable."--
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Sad but bearable because the son's death is the jumping off point for the book, so it doesn't hit you like a ton of bricks. I think what I liked best was that there were a lot of things that set it up to be very cliche, but most of them got turned on their heads.
3.5 stars. Poorly plotted book about a fascinating piece of history - the US government arranging all-expense paid trips for mothers who had lost their sons in WWI to visit their graves in France in the early 1930s. I thought I was going to experience the trip through five different women's viewpoints, but instead there were lots of superfluous secondary characters and subplots that left most of the women little more than caricatures. There was a slow build until the final 50 pages, which were so jam-packed with action that the events barely registered.
Bravo to the author for shining a light on the Gold Star mothers, but I wish she had produced a slightly more polished effort.
