Anna, the protagonist of this WW II era story, is a kind of Rosie the Riveter. After beginning as one of the girls in the administrative pool at the Brooklyn Naval yards, as a 19-year-old she lives her dream to become one of the boys that SCUBA dives into the harbor of Wallabout Bay. The book's description of 1940s New York is so expertly delivered you can only envision the luncheonette's, men in fedoras, and bustling traffic existing in black and white. The characters that surround Anna are also well drawn, but taken as an ensemble seem rather pointless. Anna has a crippled younger sister. Her father works for the underground black market but disappears for the middle half of the book and near the end survives 21 days at sea on a raft in the Indian Ocean. Anna's Aunt is a floozy. Her paramour is a gangster running shady nightclubs. Her mother returns to Minnesota. And so on. It is hard to tell why this book made the long list for the National Book Award in 1917. It feels like a series of well-done scenes and characters who all accidentally walked into the same novel.
Comments
Post a Comment