Letters from Home

Letters from Home

Kristina McMorris

Genre: Women's Fiction, Historical Fiction

Summary (from Goodreads):  Chicago, 1944. Liz Stephens has little interest in attending a USO club dance with her friends Betty and Julia. She doesn't need a flirtation with a lonely serviceman when she's set to marry her childhood sweetheart. Yet something happens the moment Liz glimpses Morgan McClain. They share only a brief exchange--cut short by the soldier's evident interest in Betty--but Liz can't forget him. Thus, when Betty asks her to ghostwrite a letter to Morgan, stationed overseas, Liz reluctantly agrees.

Thousands of miles away, Morgan struggles to adjust to the brutality of war. His letters from "Betty" are a comfort, their soul-baring correspondence a revelation to them both. While Liz is torn by her feelings for a man who doesn't know her true identity, Betty and Julia each become immersed in their own romantic entanglements. And as the war draws to a close, all three will face heart-wrenching choices, painful losses, and the bittersweet joy of new beginnings.

Beautifully rendered and deeply moving, Letters from Home is a story of hope and connection, of sacrifices made in love and war--and the chance encounters that change us forever.

Review: This was a good book, but it took me a while to get into it, and I had a hard time keeping all the characters straight.  The beginning is pretty slow, and the three main female characters all seemed to have similar voices.  The story pick up halfway through, and the characters had differentiated themselves based on their experiences at least, so I found myself eager to read the last half of the book.  The letters between Liz and Morgan were beautifully written, and made me wish people still wrote letters like that!  But at times, the writing style was a little overly dramatic for me.  While I found the chapters written from Morgan's perspective to be interesting, the dialogue of his wartime buddies seemed a little stereotypical.  All-in-all, an interesting story, but not earth-shattering.

Rating: 3 stars