Hey friends,
It's been a while. How have you been? It feels like a lifetime ago since I've been on here, and in some ways I think it has. We were in a very different world back then.
I've been doing a lot of reading lately, trying to get through the library that is my TBR, and it's allowed me rediscover some books I didn't know I had.
Historical fiction is not something I tend to read, but frankly I don't know what I tend to read anymore. Quite a while back I received The Fire by Night from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer, and I figured "here's where I start reading something different"... and then I put it down and forgot about it. But then last year I got into a sort of reading rut, I din't know what to read and I started picking up all types of books just to put them back down again. That's when I stumbled across The Fire By Night again, and I really started to get it.
The book tells the story of two U.S. Army nurses during WWII. Josephine "Jo" McMahone, a brassy Italian-Irish Catholic girl from New York, and Kay Elliot a shy, naive farm girl from Indiana. Both girls, who met in training and formed a strong bond over the trials and traumas they faced together, are now separated by miles and oceans. Jo is in France with six wounded soldiers when half her camp is hit by a roadside bomb as they are pulling back from the fighting lines. Now alone with six wounded soldiers, and a handful of people protecting them, Jo must find the courage to keep going, even with the loss of both her brother Gianni, and her mentor Queenie. Meanwhile Kay is in a POW camp in Manila, mourning the loss of her husband, Aaron, and the life they tried to build in Hawaii before the attack on Pearl Harbor, while fighting to survive the famine and brutality of the Communist Japanese.
This book is powerfully raw in it's descriptions of what it was truly like to live in these dire conditions. Fighting to survive during one of the darkest times in history. Both women fight with starvation, disease, and existential questions of faith while finding some courage to keep strong during a time where there seemed no hope. Jo, whom the book follows more closely, feels torn when she is described as a saint. Something she struggles with throughout the book. Her head nurse Queenie seems to her to be the epitome of what the American nurse should be, she's skilled compassionate, and completely unshakable. Jo continually draws her strength from Queenie, following her every word. Queenie is such a powerful leader that all the nurses in their group can't help but look up to her as the older sister they wished they had. Once she along with all the rest of their nurses are lost, Jo wonders how she will go on. Even so much as feeling the survivors guilt that someone else would have done it better, but nonetheless she trudges forward. She learns new skills, serving as both doctor and nurse, as she discovers she has a patient with apendicitis, and no other skilled person to help her. She dresses wounds and cares for her patients as though it's the only thing she has left to do, feeling that there is no hope to see an end to the destruction the war is causing.
Jo is, in my opinion, the example of the hopelessness of a fixed mindset. She sees the world in black and white, that there are good people and bad people and that there is no way to change what side you are on. Until she has an encounter with a wounded German soldier. The man, armed and desperate, comes to steal food from them. Jo helps him with his wounds, changing the dressings and decides that doing the right thing even for the enemy is what keeps us human. That no matter how ugly the world gets we are defined by our actions; how we help others; how we stand up to our fears.
I find this beautiful, because this is where Jo starts seeing herself as a heroine, she starts seeing where she really can make a difference. and what she can do to help others.
One thing that bothered me about this book was how much effort was put into Jo's story, and how little was put into Kay's. At times it was even downright boring. And that really upset me. Kay's story starts out strong. She and the other soldiers have set up a base in
Malinta Tunnel on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines. Also working out of a makeshift hospital Kay begins to have her own set of illnesses. She feels the anxiety and claustrophobia of living in hiding, attending to her patients and ignoring her own needs. Often she daydreams of her life before the war. Kay was stationed at Pearl Harbor before the attack. There she meets Aaron, they marry, and Kay begins to dream up all the amazing things that will happen in their life. Kay finds out she's pregnant and she and Aaron are ecstatic to begin their lives together in paradise when the harbor is attacked. In the chaos and horror of it all Arron does not survive, and shortly after Kay miscarries their child. Soon after she is transferred to Malinta where she continues to grieve her husband and child, before they are captured and moved to a POW camp. There Kay does what she can to not incur the wrath of their captors and help to hide evidence of a planned escape.
Looking back I think I found more interest in Kay's story line, but right off the bat it was evident we wouldn't get much of it. Part of me even wishes theses were two different books. Kay's story line was treated as filler, something to keep you anticipating Jo's story. You could tell that there wasn't as much care given to her story and the expansion of her character, and that really frustrated me. In the end her story was summed up in a letter she sent to Jo, and briefly described by Jo herself. I feel like she deserved more. If the story was to show how strong and heroic these women were, why was only one of them given the attention a hero deserves?
Don't get me wrong I loved Jo's story as well, in post wartime Jo dedicates herself to helping POWs, and working in the war office to help out in any of the minute details that come along with putting the world back together. She even finds love. Jo builds a connection with a patient, David, as she cares for him, eventually, when the war is ended, and they are separated, she works tirelessly to find him. To put her life back together, and to find her own happiness she goes to the ends of the earth, and she is truly a very strong person, she doesn't do it because it gives her glory, though she is awarded the purple heart for her outstanding courage, she does it because she knows it's the right thing to do, and because she has to fight until everyone is back from the war not just her. I just wish that same effort was afforded to Kay's story.
It seemed too much like Kay was an afterthought, and if that was the case then why add the character in the first place? If you aren't going to do them justice. And if it is to show that not everyone is the hero (Kay), and not everyone get's a happy ending (Jo) then make that point clearer, and not an excuse a reader will use to make up for poor writing.
In the end I did genuinely enjoy this book, but there were still things I felt needed to be cleaned up. The first few chapters were dull and had no development. there were points where grammatical errors and run-on sentences caused a lot of confusion about what was actually going on, and I felt that overall Kay was robbed of a really compelling story line. Maybe I'm being too critical, but I just felt like this book had the potential to be so much better, and just missed the mark.
