Staff Book Review

Dream When You're Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg

Chicago writer Elizabeth Berg has published quite a bit, but after a trade show last fall where I heard her speak, I got my hands on Dream When You're Feeling Blue and gulped it down with gusto. Let me say that I am a nut for World War II and its fashions, the seemingly endless nostalgia it inspires, and even the music. However, her story is about Kitty Heaney, born of a typical Irish Catholic family in Chicago, who becomes one of many defense factory workers,widely known as the iconic Rosie the Riveter. But Kitty is not an old-fashioned girl. Her thoughts and responses to the deprivations and opportunities of wartime are not always predictable. And Berg gives us a description of the homefront that is far more nuanced and interesting than many other fiction accounts of World War II.

The novel ends many years after it begins, but the fates of the characters and how the war shapes them for life are not made simple or convenient or easily predictable. A wonderful glimpse into a time that came before my life span, but one that reminds the reader how much women's lives have changed- and not always for the better. I also was relieved that in place of Berg skimps on the big melodramatic scenes that might be the expected fare for a wartime novel. Her characters and the effort she makes to allow us into each one's thoughts and emotions become the force driving the narrative. As she delves into Kitty Heaney and her family, Berg tells the timeless story of a woman who has to learn to stand for herself.

Her new volume of short stories, The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, was released in April. The stories therein are all tales of women defying some sort of convention, and is on my bedside bookcase, to be reviewed when completed.

Book Review by Janet Loveland at Cranesbill Books

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