The Wartime Sisters by Lynda Cohen Loigman #thewartimesisters @lyndacloigman @stmartinspress #historicalfiction #womensfiction @absltmom

Welcome to Saturday, the first one in the new Year. Hope your first Saturday is filled with lots of good things……like reading a wonderful book.

The book The Wartime Sisters is really a story about two girls raised in the same Jewish household where one has been treated differently than the other. One sister, Millie, seems favored over the other sister, Ruth, because she possesses looks, allure, and the mother’s desire for her to marry up in society, while the other daughter is treated like she is not even a close second to being what her sister is. As you can imagine, this causes a huge chasm to open in the girls’ relationship that carries them into their future with anger and resentment.

The girls grow and both marry, Ruth to a scientist assigned to the Springfield Armory, which was an actual place, established by George Washington in 1794. The other sister, Millie, marries as well, assigned to a life that is the exact opposite of what her parents wanted or wished for. Eventually, through fate, they wind up together based at the Springfield Armory where tensions seethed as they both learn the secrets and the duplicitous nature that each has.

This was not particularly a story of wartime, although there are some references to it. It is a story of how resentment grows and destroys relationships between siblings that should be solid and loving. It was a sad story for lost years, lost opportunities, and the harm at times a parent does in seeming to favor one child over another. Some can recover and form a familial relationship, while others continue to feel and live the great divide that exists between them. How these two sisters relate and perhaps resolve the things that have driven them apart over the years is what makes this book an engaging story.

Thank you to Lynda Cohen Loigman, St Martin’s Press, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book due to be published on January 22, 2019.

The Springfield Armory… “Originally created here as the main arsenal for the Continental Army in 1777 during the Revolutionary War (where ammunition was manufactured, weapons repaired and stored, artillery maintained, and army supplied stock-piled), the arsenal was ordered to become a full-fledged manufactory, or Armory, of flintlock muskets in 1794 on orders from President Washington. Over the next 174 years, the first national armory manufactured and developed the nation’s military weapons in the unhappy event of war. In 1964, Sec. of Defense McNamara decided that private contractors could make all the nation’s military weapons. Four years later, the flag was lowered by the US Army and the gates closed. The greatest number of employees, mostly civilians, was in World War II from 1941-45 when over 14,000 men and women (~42% of the workforce) labored day and night fabricating the semi-automatic M-1 Garand rifle. In the first half of the 1800’s, the Armory successfully undertook the creation of modern mass manufacture of fully-interchangeable weapons. The methods developed at the Armory formed the basis to the precision metals industry in the United States leading to mass production of bicycles, automobiles, aircraft not only nationally, but worldwide.” (National Park Service)

and here’s the author:

Lynda Cohen Loigman grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. She received a B.A. in English and American Literature from Harvard College and a law degree from Columbia Law School. Lynda practiced trusts and estates law in New York City for eight years before moving out of the city to raise her two children with her husband. She wrote The Two-Family House while she was a student of the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. The Two-Family House was chosen by Goodreads as a best book of the month for March, 2016, and was a nominee for the Goodreads 2016 Choice Awards in Historical Fiction. Lynda’s second novel, The Wartime Sisters, will be published on January 22, 2019.