Dream When You're Feeling Blue: A Novel

From Booklist The best-selling, prolific Berg has reimagined the biblical story of Mary and Joseph in Nazareth in he Handmaid and the Carpenter (2006) and re-created the turbulent civil rights drama of 1960s Mississippi in We Are All Welcome Here (2005). She sets her latest in Chicago during World War II, featuring three Irish Catholic sisters--Kitty, Louise, and Tish Heaney. The novel opens as Kitty and Louise say good-bye to their boyfriends at Union Station as they head off to war. Over the next three years, the sisters--amid the usual sibling squabbles over borrowed clothes and makeup--learn what it means to sacrifice during wartime. Kitty takes on an exhausting job at Douglas Aircraft; Louise, deeply in love with her boyfriend, keeps her worries to herself while writing him upbeat letters full of the news of home; and Trish spends her weekends at USO dances, promising to write to every soldier she meets. Berg makes the most of her Chicago setting, working in references to iconic institutions such as the old Marshall Field's department store and the Palmer House hotel. She also deftly mixes up the tone, moving easily between the wry dialogue of the long-married Heaney parents and the sad and affecting letters from the soldiers at the front. Although a final plot twist may not be fully credible, it does little to detract from this affectionate tribute to the patriotic 1940s and the women of the Greatest Generation. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the hardcover edition. From Publishers Weekly A Rita Hayworth look-alike and her sister keep the home fires burning for young men going off to fight WWII in Berg's nostalgic tale of wartime romance and family sacrifice. Hoping her boyfriend, Julian, will propose before shipping out to the Pacific, beautiful redhead Kitty Heaney discovers not only is she not engaged, but she's enlisted as the delivery person for her sister Louise's engagement ring from Michael, her boyfriend, who has departed for the European front. Distance makes Louise's and Michael's hearts grow fonder while Kitty discovers independence through her job at a bomber factory. As the months go by, Louise learns she is pregnant and Kitty meets an attractive soldier (one of many the girls encounter) at a USO dance. As the young soldiers offer a range of feelings about war from humor to anger, wonder to despair, Berg ( We Are All Welcome Here ; The Handmaid and the Carpenter ; 2000 Oprah pick Open House ) captures changing attitudes toward working women and single mothers in this sentimental celebration of a bygone era. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the hardcover edition. From AudioFile In Chicago, the Heany sisters, Kitty and Louise, send their boyfriends off to fight in WWII and faithfully write two-page letters every day, while sister Tish writes to as many soldiers as she can. Listeners see how the war changed societys view of working women--until the men came home--and get glimpses into the sacrifices made on the home front. As narrator, Berg does well with dialogue. Her sparkling personality shines through the characters. Everyone sounds so nice, so decent, so 1940s. While Bergs use of details, such as food rationing, pin curls, and USO dances, gives a strong sense of time, its a saccharine sweet, sentimentalized look back through rosy pink nostalgia. This is not Bergs best, but its worth a listen. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 APRIL 1943It was Kitty’s turn to sleep with her head at the foot of the bed. She didn’t mind; she preferred it, actually. She liked the mild disorientation that came from that position, and she liked the relative sense of privacy—her sisters’ feet in her face, yes, but not their eyes, not their ears, nor the close, damp sounds of their breathing. And at the foot of the bed she was safe from Louise, who often yanked mercilessly at people’s hair in her sleep. Tonight Kitty was last to bed, having been last in the bathroom. Everybody liked it when Kitty was last in the bathroom because, of the eight people living in the house, she always took the longest. Apart from the normal ablutions, she did things in there: affected poses she thought made her look even more like Rita Hayworth—she did look like Rita Hayworth, everyone said so. She filed her fingernails, she experimented with combining perfumes to make a new scent, she creamed her face, she used eyebrow pencil to make beauty marks above her lip. She also read magazines in the bathroom because there, no one read over her shoulder. Oh, somebody would bang on the door every time she wasxa0 in there, somebody was always banging on the bathroom door, but axa0 girl could get a lot done in a room with a locked door. Kitty could do more in five minutes in the bathroom than in thirty minutes anywhere else in the house, where everyone in the family felt it their right—their obligation!—to butt into everyone else’s business. When Kitty came out of the bathroom, she tiptoed into the bedroom, where it appeared her sisters were already asleep—Tish on her side with her knees drawn up tight, Louise with the covers flung off. Kitty crouched down by Louise and whispered her sister’s name. Kitty wanted to talk; she wasn’t ready to sleep yet. But Louise didn’t budge. Kitty moved to the bottom of the bed, slid beneath the covers, and sighed quietly. She stared up at the ceiling, thinking of Julian, of how tomorrow he would be leaving, off to fight in the Pacific with the Marines, and no one knew for how long. And Michael, Louise’s fiancé, he would be leaving, too, leaving at the same time but going in the opposite direction, for he was in the Army and shipping out to Europe. And why were they not in the same branch of the service, these old friends? Because Julian liked the forest green of the Marine uniforms better than the olive drab of the Army or the blue of the Navy. Also because James Roosevelt, the president’s son, was in the Marines. It seemed so odd to Kitty. So frightening and dangerous and even romantic; there was an element of romance to this war, but mostly it just felt so odd. As though the truth of all this hadn’t quite caught up with her, nor would it for a while. No matter the graphic facts in FDR’s Day of Infamy speech after the bombing of Pearl Harbor: the three thousand lives lost, the next day’s declaration of war on Japan, then Germany’s declaration of war on the United States. Kitty’s facts were these: she was Kitty; he was Julian; every Saturday night they went downtown for dinner at Toffenetti’s and then to one of the movie palaces on State Street. Sometimes, after that, he would take her to the Empire Room at the Palmer House for a pink squirrel, but her parents didn’t like for Kitty to stay out so late, or to drink. Now his leave after basic was up and he was shipping out, he was going over there. And both boys foolishly volunteering for the infantry! Kitty rose up on her elbows and again whispered Louise’s name. A moment, and then she spoke out loud. “Hey? Louise?” Nothing. Kitty fell back and rested her hands across her chest, one over the other, then quickly yanked them apart. It was like death, to lie that way; it was how people lay in coffins. She never slept that way, she always slept on her side. Why had she done that? Was it a premonition of some sort, a sign? What if it was a sign? “Louise!” she said, and now her sister mumbled back, “Cripes, Kitty, will you go to sleep!” It was good to hear her sister’s voice, even in anger. It soothed and anchored her. She breathed out, closed her eyes, and in a short while felt herself drifting toward sleep. She wanted to dream of Julian on the day she first met him: confident, careless, his blond hair mussed and hanging over one eye, his short-sleeved shirt revealing the disturbing curves of his muscles. She tried to will herself toward that. From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Elizabeth Berg is the New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including We Are All Welcome Here, The Year of Pleasures, The Art of Mending, Say When, True to Form, Never Change, and Open House , which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2000. Durable Goods and Joy School were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year, and Talk Before Sleep was short-listed for the ABBY Award in 1996. The winner of the 1997 New England Booksellers Award for her body of work, Berg is also the author of a nonfiction work, Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True. She lives in Chicago. To schedule a speaking engagement, please contact American Program Bureau at www.apbspeakers.com --This text refers to the hardcover edition. Read more