The Postmistress - Sarah Blake

This book first caught my attention over a year ago at the bookstore where I worked because of it's elegant, beautiful cover.  I picked it up all the time to read the jacket and started hearing a lot of good things about it from various customers I'd interact with but somehow I just never got around to reading it until this week.  It was part of the batch of books I just got from the library, that I pulled from my list.  I've been carrying it around for days, keeping it close, and finished it last night curled up on my couch, relaxing after a full day of Christmas visiting.  

A very beautiful book.  It's set in World War II, and approaches a lot of issues simultaneously, but with such subtlety that you are just absorbing thoughts and feelings about various things while still being absorbed in the story.  The underlying themes of the book touch on ideas like news, and what we do with the news, both personal news and the larger news of the world. It looks at the idea of being watched, by a God you believe in or by someone who loves you; at the idea of wanting, hoping, that you are being watched, that someone, anyone is paying attention.  Also moving; displacement, losing home/creating a new home/leaving forever. Being an outsider.  It touches on more typical themes of war such as loss, survival, chance, accident and apathy. 

Ms Blake chose to set her book at an interesting moment in history; one where the war is raging on one side of the Atlantic and you the reader are able to watch both the bombs raining down on London and the peaceful happenings of a small American town not yet touched by the war at all. The idea of looking the other way, or the wrong way, is a strong one in this novel.  I loved how well she evokes the time period, how she plays with the chaos in one place and the idea of simultaneity, that the chaos is happening at the same time as an idyllic summer evening somewhere else. The authour's careful  research reads clearly in the novel and does it a great service, though she has taken a few liberties here and there for the sake of telling the story.  That in itself is interesting because many times the story itself touches on how to tell a story, what a story is, the way that they can have a life of their own, the way there is a lot happening around the edges, which is a big factor in the way this plot is laid out; in scenes happening around the edges of the action we know about but don't directly see.  

A beautiful read.  I loved the way the time period is evoked.  I thought it was really interesting to read a different perspective on that particular war; to get an idea of how the journalists at the time functioned there, of the role radio had in bringing the truth of the situation to the rest of the world.  I had never thought about the details of what it must have been like on the trains themselves, of the waves of people moving through Europe during the early years of the war.  It was really interesting to be introduced to those different perspectives that I hadn't come across before in such detail.

I'm so glad I finally read this. And it's satisfying to prove to myself once again that yes, book covers can tell you a lot about what to expect.