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For fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, The Postmistress, and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, a story of love, war, loss, and the scars they leave set during the years of World War II and its aftermath.
It’s 1941. Babe throws like a boy, thinks for herself, and never expects to escape the poor section of her quiet Massachusetts town. Then World War II breaks out, and everything changes. Her friend Grace, married to a reporter on the local paper, fears being left alone with her infant daughter when her husband ships out; Millie, the third member of their childhood trio, now weds the boy who always refused to settle down; and Babe wonders if she should marry Claude, who even as a child could never harm a living thing. As the war rages abroad, life on the home front undergoes its own battles and victories; and when the men return, and civilian life resumes, nothing can go back to quite the way it was.
From postwar traumas to women’s rights, racial injustice to anti-Semitism, Babe, Grace, and Millie experience the dislocations, the acute pains, and the exhilaration of a society in flux. Along the way, they will learn what it means to be a wife, a mother, a friend, a fighter, and a survivor. Beautiful, startling, and heartbreaking, Next to Love is a love letter to the brave women who shaped a nation’s destiny.
“Impossible to put down.” —Stacy Schiff
Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.
- Sales Rank: #1146047 in Books
- Published on: 2012-05-15
- Released on: 2012-05-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .70" w x 5.12" l, .53 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
57 of 60 people found the following review helpful.
Highly moving novel of war
By Annie B
Next to Love is a deeply moving novel of war, love and friendship. More than that, it's the story of just how war, in this book's case WWII, leaves its mark not only on the soldiers and their families, but on society.
Since the book descripton summarizes this book so well (unlike many of them), I'll just add that the book is beautifully written and the characters are believable. Babe, Grace and Millie have been friends since they were young children, but they are very different women and experience the war and its aftermath very differently. I feel this gives the book a broader prospective on war experiences than some others I've read. It made me think of relatives who served in WWII and their spouses and I realized that their experiences were very similiar. I know that like the characters in this book for them the war never really ended--they carried, and still carry the scars from it every day. I also realized that as children of a WWII veteran, just how much the war impacted our family and choices that were made, or not made. Clearly, like the characters in this book, the war was always a shadow hovering over us.
Next to Love doesn't only deal with love and war, but also American society before and after WWII. It clearly shows the class and race struggles. I have to say that this made me view the race struggles much differently than I had previously. It is now so obvious to me that the Civil Rights Movement had to occur after WWII, as did the Women's Movement. Both were inevitable after WWII had shaken everything up so much that conventions basically flew out of the window. How could anyone really believe that things could just go back to how they were before. I loved how the author wove these things into the story, enriching the book even more.
I thoroughly, completely enjoyed this book. The writing is superb and I felt I really understood these women and their struggles. This book had a big impact on me, and the characters and their stories will stay with me for a long, long time. I will definitely look into other books by this author. Overall, deeply affecting novel written with great insight and understanding. A wonderful choice for book clubs!
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES??
By Red Rock Bookworm
Today we share all of our feelings about everything with everyone. We feel compelled to voice our problems to anyone who will listen. We have television programs where each and every unsavory aspect of someone's life is placed on display for the world to see and savor. NEXT TO LOVE takes the reader back to a time when certain areas of ones life were not shared, not even between best friends, and each person quietly coped in their own private way.
Unlike many of the WWII novels currently making their way onto the shelves at the local libraries and bookstores, NEXT TO LOVE is a uniquely American saga that takes place over approximately twenty-five years and follows the lives of three women living in a small town trying to come to grips with war's effects on their lives and the lives of their children. Grace, Millie and Babe are the women in question and their ever evolving relationships are the basis of this novel. There are no big dramatic, bloody war scenes or stories of men in battle. Instead, Ellen Feldman paints a vivid picture of what was happening on the home front and how the women left behind coped with everyday life. She shows us a time when the acronym PTSD did not exist but its effects were evident in the behavior of many of the returning soldiers.
The story moves from 1941 to 1964 and examines the profound and dramatic changes in the world and in the lives of these women. We see the evolution of the United States as it deals with the uncertain realities of racism, sexism, bigotry and the prospect of yet another war. The only aspect of this book that I found mildly annoying was the author's inclination to jump back and forth in time. I found myself constantly rechecking the chapter headings to see what year it was because I felt I had previously read about a particular event....and as it turned out....I had.
Having lived through this era it amazes me that when I recall these turbulent years they are rather pleasant, even idyllic in nature. Perhaps we are fortunate that memory presents our past to us like an impressionists painting, softly focused and blurring the distasteful events in our lives. It's not until we step closer and really examine the past that the true picture becomes clear....and Ms. Feldman's mega pixel camera with zoom lens brings this pivotal point in America's past into sharp focus. 3 1/2 stars
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Three women changed by war
By TChris
War stories cover familiar ground. Men go to war; some don't return. Those who don't die come back changed. Next to Love tells that story with a twist: its focus is not on the men who go to war but on the wives and lovers left behind. They furnish the novel's perspective on war's casualties: we see their reactions to husbands' deaths and to the erosion of the souls they once knew. The women in the novel are hard hit by war; dozens of the men from their town storm the beaches on D-Day and many die. As the book continues into the 1950s, the novel reflects postwar America in microcosm: the nascent civil rights movement, the baby boom, the displacement of women from the workforce and the blossoming of -- if not feminism -- a growing feeling of discontent on the part of women who are expected to make babies and martinis and leave everything else to men.
Babe Huggins grew up on the wrong side of a small town, about ninety miles from Boston. The nation has gone to war and women (including Babe's friends Grace and Millie) are marrying and getting pregnant by men who will soon return to battle. Babe is not married to Claude when she discovers the longstanding relationship between sex and war but she loves him and lives in fear of his death. Babe is an independent, unconventional thinker but she worries about how other women regard her. Knowing them to be hypocrites, she nonetheless judges herself by their standards and (rather unfairly) finds herself wanting. Her story --as it develops over the course of many years -- is one of pain that induces growth.
Millie and Grace have their own stories, yet as important as they are to the novel, the book belongs to Babe. Millie and Grace focus their lives on being good wives and mothers. They are not untouched by the exterior world (one experiences the indirect effects of religious prejudice, the other begins to question her new husband's true nature) but they are content to usher in the 1950s with its illusion of perfect families, happy stay-at-home moms, and devoted husbands. Only Babe seems to recognize that the national promise of equality for all Americans remains unfulfilled. Babe misses the role she played during the war, small though it was, when she held a job and believed in a cause. By the mid-1950s, Babe is "grieving for her own life ... she is, in some way she does not understand, broken."
The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that Ellen Feldman tries to cover too much ground in too few pages. Millie's story seems artificial, as if Feldman felt the need to dream up a problem for her so that she'd fit in with the other characters. Relatively late in the novel, Feldman gives stories to the children of Grace and Millie. Those stories feel unfinished, probably because the kids' lives are just beginning while the novel is nearing its end. The story surrounding Millie's son Jack contributes to the novel's themes while the one involving Grace's daughter Amy adds little.
To some extent, the novel is populated with stereotypes, or at least with characters we've seen many times before: the small town gossips; the man who resents every soldier who came home from the war in which his son died; the girl whose thoughts are elsewhere as she loses her virginity to a boy who is clearly using her. Occasional scenes are a bit overdone or clichéd (a discharged soldier hiding under a bed at the sound of celebratory gunfire was one) but those are rare. There are also times when the story lacks subtlety, as if Feldman felt the need to make a social evil as obvious as she could so it wouldn't escape the notice of dim readers.
Despite its flaws, this is a strong novel. Feldman writes movingly of grief. She writes perceptively of social change. Her prose is fluid and evocative. She tells an important story that is well worth reading. If I could, I would give Next to Love 4 1/2 stars.
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