Dream When You're Feeling Blue

March 19, 2007
A Rita Hayworth look-alike and her sister keep the home fires burning for young men going off to fight WWII in Berg's nostalgic tale of wartime romance and family sacrifice. Hoping her boyfriend, Julian, will propose before shipping out to the Pacific, beautiful redhead Kitty Heaney discovers not only is she not engaged, but she's enlisted as the delivery person for her sister Louise's engagement ring from Michael, her boyfriend, who has departed for the European front. Distance makes Louise's and Michael's hearts grow fonder while Kitty discovers independence through her job at a bomber factory. As the months go by, Louise learns she is pregnant and Kitty meets an attractive soldier (one of many the girls encounter) at a USO dance. As the young soldiers offer a range of feelings about war from humor to anger, wonder to despair, Berg (We Are All Welcome Here
; The Handmaid and the Carpenter
; 2000 Oprah pick Open House
) captures changing attitudes toward working women and single mothers in this sentimental celebration of a bygone era.

April 15, 2007
Berg ("Open House") has done a spot-on job of researching the World War II years; she hardly misses a beat. She focuses on the Chicago Heaneys, a loving family enduring the tumultuous years of 194346. USO dances, pin curls, V-mail, food rationing, and newsreels figure prominently in this romantic story of the three Heaney sisters, nicknamed the "Dreamy Girls." Eldest Kitty, front and center, is unlike her younger sisters. Searching for more than a husband, she attempts to make her own contribution to the war effort by entering the aircraft industry and is one of the few local young women to do so. As the war rages on, Kitty begins to have her doubts about the future. Closing in on Kitty and her sisters' frivolities, innocence, and adjustment to loss, Berg also sheds light on the nation's acclimation to war. The Heaneys' warmth and love are integral to Berg's portrait, as is a 1940s Chicago that includes streetcars, Marshall Fields, the Palmer House, and summers on Lake Michigan. Yet while the evolving era and the family's intimacies are painstakingly presented, the conclusion is rushed and thus compromised. Nevertheless, this is a good purchase for public libraries, especially where Berg is popular. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/07.]Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2007
The best-selling, prolific Berg has reimagined the biblical story of Mary and Joseph in Nazareth in " he Handmaid and the Carpenter" (2006) and re-created the turbulent civil rights drama of 1960s Mississippi in " We Are All Welcome Here" (2005). She sets her latest in Chicago during World War II, featuring three Irish Catholic sisters--Kitty, Louise, and Tish Heaney. The novel opens as Kitty and Louise say good-bye to their boyfriends at Union Station as they head off to war. Over the next three years, the sisters--amid the usual sibling squabbles over borrowed clothes and makeup--learn what it means to sacrifice during wartime. Kitty takes on an exhausting job at Douglas Aircraft; Louise, deeply in love with her boyfriend, keeps her worries to herself while writing him upbeat letters full of the news of home; and Trish spends her weekends at USO dances, promising to write to every soldier she meets. Berg makes the most of her Chicago setting, working in references to iconic institutions such as the old Marshall Field's department store and the Palmer House hotel. She also deftly mixes up the tone, moving easily between the wry dialogue of the long-married Heaney parents and the sad and affecting letters from the soldiers at the front. Although a final plot twist may not be fully credible, it does little to detract from this affectionate tribute to the patriotic 1940s and the women of the Greatest Generation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)