This week, we go back to WWI just in time for the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. This week, we’re looking at Girls On The Line by Aimie K Runyan.
This book opens with a woman trapped in the Philadelphia High Society scene due to the era and her parents’ desire to try to break into it. Her problem is that she doesn’t want that life – she wants to be a fully independent woman, and has even taken part in the suffrage movement while in college. She already works as a switchboard operator, and when the call comes that the Army needs just such ladies for the war effort in Europe, she leaves the social pages and heads to the front lines.
This was an excellent historical fiction book that got most of the details I remember from my not overly detailed studies of the era correct and weaves a great story of people trying to find their way during the social turmoil of life in the 1910s. While historical fiction isn’t normally my thing, Runyan’s work here proves that I may need to explore opening myself even more. Yet another stand out work from Lake Union Publishing, and I’m looking forward to seeing more from Runyan in particular.
A Tale of Two Times. This book was a fascinating look at how World War One truly marked a demarkation in American history that is often times glossed over between the tumult of the American Civil War and the birth of the modern American Superpower in WWII, though I do not think it quite as glossed over as the author implies in her notes at the end of the book. The story presented here truly examines the author’s thesis in detail though, and presents a moving drama within that framework. An excellent book that brings attention to one of the conflict’s groups of unsung heroes, this book could well do for the ‘Hello Girls’ what other recent books did for the ladies of the Apollo program in NASA.