From Publishers Weekly
At the end of WWII, a 26-year-old navy pilot meets and falls in love with a beautiful California girl named Beebe. They have about two weeks together before he is shipped off to the South Pacific for six months. When he returns they marry, have four sons and 10 good years together before he, still in the military, is killed in a plane crash off Bermuda in 1956. At the time of his death, his wife was pregnant with a daughter. The daughter spends her life longing for information about the father she never knew. Years later, after her mother's death, the daughter finds a bundle of letters that her father wrote to her mother in the six months before their marriage. Those letters are presented along with a foreword and afterword by the daughter, Sweeney, now a New York literary agent and gardening book author. The letters portray a decent, kindhearted young man with a quirky sense of humor who is obviously in love. Aside from a few colloquialisms of the 1940s, they could have been written by any lovesick military man in history. They are often corny, sometimes boring (as they only partially open doors into the psyches driving this old-fashioned romantic correspondence) and never erotic (not even suggestive unless "Greetings, my scandalous Scandinavian" counts). While these letters are obviously very precious to the woman who discovered them, they don't offer much character development or anything unique. (Apr. 10)Forecast: While war correspondence is a crowded subgenre, this attractively packaged little book (5" 7") has a blurb from War Letters editor Andrew Carroll and a planned tour that includes a stop at Annapolis. With more than 1.5 million members of the U.S. Armed Forces, it has a ready audience alert to the perils of separation, along with many more sympathetic to that predicament.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Library Journal
This engaging compilation of love letters written in the early months of 1946 by a young navy pilot named Jack Sweeney can only be described as a sweet love story that captures the personality of an intelligent and fun-loving man. Emma Sweeney, an author and literary agent, has compiled these letters as an homage to the father she never knew (Jack was killed on duty in an airplane crash in 1956, leaving four sons and his unborn daughter). The preface and afterword are a heartfelt explanation of both her need to know her father and the results of her research. Unfortunately, the book does not hold as much in the way of historical value as such works as Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front and Miss You: The World War II Letters of Barbara Wooddall Taylor and Charles E. Taylor. Additionally, Emma's mother's letters do not survive to give us a fuller picture of this courtship. However, the memoir is charming and would be a welcome addition to larger public libraries or libraries with a large collection of wartime correspondence. Maria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
