THE POSTMISTRESS

THE POSTMISTRESS by Sarah Blake

From the back of the book:

In 1940, Iris James is the postmistress in coastal Franklin, Massachusetts.  Iris knows more about the townspeople than she will ever say - for example, that Emma Trask has come to marry the town's doctor, and that Harry Vale watches the ocean for U-boats. Iris believes her job is to deliver secrets.  Yet one day she does the unthinkable:  slips a letter into her pocket, reads it, and doesn't deliver it.

Meanwhile Frankie Bard broadcasts from overseas with Edward R. Murrow.  Her dispatches beg listeners to pay heed as the Nazis bomb London nightly.  Most of the townspeople of Franklin think the war can't touch them.  But Iris and Emma and Frankie know better...

THE POSTMISTRESS is a tale of two worlds - one shattered by violence, the other willfully naive - and of two women whose jobs are to deliver the news, yet who find themselves unable to do so.  Through their eyes, and the eyes of everyday people caught in history's tide, it examines how we tell each other stories, and how we bear the fact of war as we live ordinary lives.

I didn't care for this book.  According to the above blurb, it sounded good.  What was in the letter that Iris read and didn't deliver?  But that's not how the story was written.

I felt no connection to any of the characters.  Iris and Emma were bland and nondescript.  Frankie had the most character of any of them, but I felt her role in this book, and her connection to Franklin, was strange.

I read this book along with some former Weight Watcher Booklover friends - I'm anxious to hear what they thought about it.