Next to Love

May 30, 2011
Feldman's latest (after Scottsboro) follows three female friends through WWII and into the '60s as lives, loves, and perceptions change both within and without. Bostonians Babe, Grace, and Millie don't want to lose the men they love to the looming war in Europe. So Grace and Millie marry their boyfriends before they ship out; Babe, on the other hand, follows Claude to his Southern Army base before he's due to join the fight in England, but is raped before reaching him. Grace and Millie's husbands die in battle, and Claude returns a changed man. The three old friends navigate life in a tumultuous era of social upheaval, holding to the belief that happiness lies in finding the right man. Babe, the quintessential girl from the wrong side of the tracks and a very sympathetic character, is determined to have life and love on her own terms. Grace and Millie, however, continue to hope for rescue and fail to learn from their mistakes. Feldman adopts multiple points of view and sticks to the awkward present tense, which instead of bringing immediacy pushes the reader away. A section of letters, though, is beautifully rendered, illuminating the characters and advancing the plot. Feldman's portrait of an era, and its women, is both well drawn and frustrating.

July 15, 2011

Sincere, at times piercing, Feldman's (Scottsboro, 2008, etc.) latest tracks the experiences of three women, best friends since kindergarten, whose fortunes are shaped by what World War II did to their men folk and their world.

Opening in Postmistress territory, Feldman's looping saga goes on to span two decades of seismic change as experienced in a small town in Massachusetts during the war years and their aftermath. Sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and consumerism all play their parts, sometimes too dutifully, yet there's no denying the searching sensitivity of much of the prose as individual fates are played out. Babe Huggins is the central female who escapes her bad neighborhood by marrying respectable history teacher Claude. Millie marries Pete and Grace marries Charlie and then all the men go off to fight, leaving the women to support each other, work and wait. Babe is relatively lucky; Claude comes home again although it will take him more than a decade to heal his invisible wounds. Millie and Grace face different struggles, but all three find themselves coping with the damage done to them, their partners, in-laws and children by war and history. And an understated ending delivers the knowledge that the cycle is far from over.

Conventional in shape and content, this nevertheless affecting tribute to the "greatest" generation is elevated by its empathy for the women left behind.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from May 15, 2011

No one knows how hard war can hit a small town better than Bernadette (Babe) Huggins, operator of the Western Union office in South Downs, MA. As the book opens, on a particular day in July 1944, wires from the War Office leave a trail of destruction across her hometown. Babe and her girlfriends Grace and Millie give us the female perspective on this war. In 1942, Babe and Millie had followed their men down to camp in North Carolina, where their nuptials took place, and now all three women are in the thick of marriage and the concomitant worry as their husbands are off to fight in Europe. Their stories move through the final days of the war, with only one of the men returning, and onward, encompassing children (and the lack thereof), breakdowns, sexuality, second marriages, racism, anti-Semitism, and self-identity. VERDICT War is hell, as are the depictions presented mostly through the letters these soldiers write home. Feldman's (Scottsboro) scathing prose intensifies the daily routines of these families and makes readers fearful and worried along with them. Yet life does go on, for better or worse. A lustrous evocation of a stormy period in our past; highly recommended for lovers of World War II fiction. [Library marketing; online reading group guide.]--Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2011
The quiet devastation wrought by WWII on the lives of ordinary Americans forms the backbone of this haunting and profoundly moving novel that interweaves the stories of three small-town women, one working-class, two wealthy, and their families from 1941 to 1964. With their new husbands fighting overseas, independent Babe, gentle Millie, and regal Grace fight another war at home, against loneliness, tedium, and the ever-present terror of receiving a telegram from the War Department. After tragedy strikes, the three struggle to reshape their lives and those of their loved ones not only around loss and heartache but also in a maturing America simultaneously launched into Eisenhower-era prosperity and rocked by the first tremors of the women's liberation and civil rights movements. At turns brave, frustrating, and fragile, Feldman's characters live and love with breathtaking intensity, and her deft juggling of several zigzagging plots makes the pages flow past with the force of a slow but mighty river. Equally impressive is her understanding of the period and of the assumptions not only about race and sex but also about keeping private pain private, which made the Greatest Generation not only flawed but often deeply, quietly miserable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)