The Secret of Raven Point by Jennifer Vanderbes

This book may be going out of print soon and as it is one that I love a great deal, I figured best to post this review while it’s still available!

A few years ago, I had to have foot surgery. Not fun. My wonderful mother agreed to come and care for me – and do the week’s grocery shopping for her invalid daughter. As I was hobbling, she left me at the bookstore (this was before I started working there) and as I needed a book to keep me company and I’m a sucker for a good World War II novel, I snatched up The Secret of Raven Point.

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Synopsis

1943: When seventeen-year-old Juliet Dufresne receives a cryptic letter from her enlisted brother and then discovers that he’s been report missing in action, she lies about her age and travels to the front lines as an army nurse, determined to find him. Shy and awkward, Juliet is thrust into the bloody chaos of a field hospital, a sprawling encampment north of Rome where she forges new friendships and is increasingly consumed by the plight of her patients.

One in particular, Christopher Barnaby, a deserter awaiting court-martial may hold the answer to her brother’s whereabouts – but the trauma of war has left him catatonic. Racing against the clock, Juliet works with an enigmatic young psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Willard, to break Barnaby’s silence before the authorities take him away. Plunged into the horrifying depths of one man’s memories of combat, Juliet and Willard are forced to plumb the moral nuances of a so-called just war and to face the dangers of their own deepening emotional connection.

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Review

I carried this book around like it was my lifeline – without it I felt I would tumble into the abyss right along with Juliet’s patients. For the first time, I didn’t listen in at lunch conversations at work, I read. I read with fervor and passion, anxious to find out if Juliet found out what happened to her brother. In the end, though, it didn’t matter – and that was the most glorious part of the story.

Generally, I’m not a huge fan of books that either jump extended amounts of time or cover great swaths of time in a short period in what I can only describe as a diagonal approach. However, in The Secret of Raven Point, doing so enhances the story telling – while being a nurse during World War II was certainly eventful, I have a feeling that most days, the activities were fairly similar – there are only so ways a bullet or mine can decimate a human being and only so many limbs that can be removed. As such, Jennifer Vanderbes skips to times that are relevant to the plot line she is developing, almost like giving a few select cross-sections of the narrative.

While Juliet’s initial and final goal is to learn the truth about what happened to her brother, it is not prevalent on each and every page. The notion is not drilled into the reader to the point where one shouts, “I get it, enough already!” Juliet has a life, she does other things, has a little fun, and does not spend every waking minute focused solely on her goal. The things we care about can consume us, but they do not need to define us.

It is rarely the case where I read a book that I end every page thinking “There’s no way I could have written that sentence,” or “How did she do that?” Words are words, they only gain meaning when we arrange them in particular ways. Typically, I won’t read a book that has any type of gore at night as I am susceptible to nightmares (Night by Elie Wiesel and Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian particularly so) but the way Jennifer Vanderbes wrote about the horrors of World War II was both powerful and palatable. But words cannot accurately describe the sensation of being pulled headfirst into Juliet’s world on the front lines of the forgotten front of World War II, the heart of Italy.

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars

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