Title: The Wartime SistersAuthor: Lynda Cohen Loigman
Published by: St. Martin's Press on Jan. 22, 2019
Genres: Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction
Pages: 304
Format: eBook, ARC
Source: St. Martin's Press, NetGalley
Book Rating: 8/10
Two estranged sisters, raised in Brooklyn and each burdened with her own shocking secret, are reunited at the Springfield Armory in the early days of WWII. While one sister lives in relative ease on the bucolic Armory campus as an officer’s wife, the other arrives as a war widow and takes a position in the Armory factories as a “soldier of production.” Resentment festers between the two, and secrets are shattered when a mysterious figure from the past reemerges in their lives.
Review:
Expressive, thoughtful, and intriguing!
The Wartime Sisters is a fascinating, sentimental story of two Jewish sisters, Ruth, the smart, dependable one, and Millie, the beautiful, irresponsible one, and their struggle to understand, accept, support, unite, and show compassion for each other in a time of personal and global instability and turmoil.
The writing is clear and precise. The characters are strong, hardworking, and determined. And the plot takes us back to the early 1940s, from Brooklyn, NY to Springfield, Massachusetts, and tells the story of two lives filled with loneliness, abuse, inequity, friction, discontent, secrets, loss, rivalry, heartbreak, motherhood, friendship, and war.
The Wartime Sisters is truly a delightful blend of compelling fiction, historical facts, and heartfelt emotion. It’s an engaging, nostalgic tale that reminds us of the complex relationship that can exist between sisters and highlights Loigman’s remarkable knowledge and research into a time and place often unknown, forgotten or overlooked.
This novel is available now.
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Thank you to St. Martins Press for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Lynda Cohen Loigman
Lynda Cohen Loigman grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. She received a B.A. in English and American Literature from Harvard College and a law degree from Columbia Law School. Lynda practiced trusts and estates law in New York City for eight years before moving out of the city to raise her two children with her husband. She wrote The Two-Family House while she was a student of the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. The Two-Family House was chosen by Goodreads as a best book of the month for March, 2016, and was a nominee for the Goodreads 2016 Choice Awards in Historical Fiction. Lynda's second novel, The Wartime Sisters, will be published on January 22, 2019.