Those who carry the truth sometimes bear a terrible weight…
It is 1940. France has fallen. Bombs are dropping on London. And President Roosevelt is promising he won’t send our boys to fight in “foreign wars.”
But American radio gal Frankie Bard, the first woman to report from the Blitz in London, wants nothing more than to bring the war home. Frankie’s radio dispatches crackle across the Atlantic ocean, imploring listeners to pay attention as the Nazis bomb London nightly, and Jewish refugees stream across Europe. Frankie is convinced that if she can just get the right story, it will wake Americans to action and they will join the fight.
Meanwhile, in Franklin, Massachusetts, a small town on Cape Cod, Iris James hears Frankie’s broadcasts and knows that it is only a matter of time before the war arrives on Franklin’s shores. In charge of the town’s mail, Iris believes that her job is to deliver and keep people’s secrets.
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake was published in 2010 by Amy Einhorn Books and is 318 pages. Frankie Bard, an American radio personality is reporting from London during the blitz of 1940. America is just about to enter WWII and tension and distress is running wild.
In Cape Cod, Iris James, the town postmistress, listens to Ms. Bard but feels distanced from the war because she is so far removed from the devastation and destruction. She is going about her life, sorting mail and developing a relationship with Harry Vale, a WWI vet and the town mechanic. Vale is passionate about watching German U-Boats along the coast. There are other listeners to Frankie. Among them are the town’s young doctor, Will Fitch, and his wife Emma. When a Dr. Fitch is involved in a terrible accident, he decides he must travel to London to help in a hospital, leaving his young wife Emma alone with only her fears and worries.
Frankie is a determined and independent young woman, after witnessing tragedy after tragedy she is set on delivering the stories of WWII to American living rooms. However, after much introspection Frankie becomes worried that the cruel and heartbreaking results of war are too much to share with her audience and she begins to question how much she should hold back and how much she should tell.
This book is filled with so many interesting and authentic characters that you become fully engrossed in the world that Sarah Blake has created.
The Postmistress was impossible to put down. Sarah Blake wrote in her afterword that she aimed to tell “the story that lies around the edges of the photographs.” In The Postmistress we meet three very different women who all face tragedy in different aspects of their lives. Frankie, Iris and Emma, each possess their own strengths and weaknesses and all are tied together by one secret.
