Frankie Bard is an American radio gal reporting from the Blitz in London, desperate for her dawdling countrymen back home to understand the need to enter World War II. Frankie's tough and fun. She can quip and quaff as quick as any of her male colleagues. She's one of three terrifically moving women — each of whom responds in her own way to the horrors of the war — in Sarah Blake's novel. Frankie's reports of an escalating conflict, and the terrifying waves of Jews flung from their homes, hold a young bride named Emma Fitch spellbound in tiny Franklin, Mass. Emma longs for a letter from her doctor husband, who has left her behind so that he can care for London's wounded and fallen. Yet it isn't Emma who first learns of the doctor's fate — it is Iris James, the town's postmistress, who delivers, daily, the letters that change people's lives. Iris, an ungainly 40-year-old with unflattering red lipstick and a crush on the town mechanic, ultimately proves to be the heart of Blake's novel. Picture Allison Janney in an immaculate government-issued navy cardigan.
The Postmistress, its cover emblazoned with a glowing blurb from The Help's Kathryn Stockett, will likely be snapped up by book clubs. There's both exquisite pain and pleasure to be found in these pages, which jump from the mass devastation in Europe to the intimate heartaches of an American small town. As a war rages, and the baby in Emma's belly grows, Frankie and Iris must answer an impossible question: When and how, if at all, should life-altering news be delivered? The ending is a bit of a miss. One final tragedy seems unnecessarily cruel. But in a novel about war, perhaps that is the point. A–
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