The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book hooked me in right from the beginning. "What would you think of a postmistress who chose not to deliver the mail?" Frankie Bard asks, and captures the attention of everyone at her dinner table. When they find out it's true, and that it happened 1941 during the war, they are shocked. It is from this beginning that the story unfolds.

It is a story of war and of love told from the eyes of several people, mainly Frankie Bard, reporter and Iris James, Postmaster of Franklin, Massachusetts. You are taken from the bomb shelters of Britain, to the trains of Europe that hold the Jews who are trying to escape and back to Franklin, Massachusetts where the townspeople hear Frankie's stories of war on the radio. They listen, but with that suspension of disbelief that comes from being on the edge of a story and not living the story itself. We live on the outside of so many stories don't we? We don't pay attention to the details and clues that might come our way and help us to help someone else escape from the story that they are in. I think that happens because we are afraid--if we get too far into another person's story, we might be changed. Perhaps we, like Dr. Fitch in the story, might say

We are all of us here in the mess. There's no way around it. And all I am in the face of it is a single voice and a pair of hands. Not anyone's son anymore. Not anyone's husband. Anonymous but necessary. Vital. A Lucky Strike.

The people and stories in "The Postmistress" were real to me. I wanted to know what was going to happen to them. In fact, I cheated, as I often do, and read the ending before I finished the book because I just had to know.

Once you've finished reading you might want to check out the author interview. I would definitely wait until you were finished with the book though, or the story may be ruined for you.

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