The Postmistress

I had high hopes for The Postmistress by Sarah Blake and they were utterly destroyed by actually reading the book. There's nothing worse than picking up a hyped piece of literature only to discover that it more closely resembles the giant dump you left in the porcelain pot this morning.

I think the reason I truly detest The Postmistress is that it had so much potential to be great and instead, it fell flat. The story traces the lives of three women--a journalist named Frankie, a doctor's wife named Emma and a postmistress named Iris--in a small town just before the US becomes active in WWII. The plot is clumsily contrived to bring the three women together. Emma arrives in Franklin on the same bus as Iris and starts a great life with her doctor husband. Soon after conceiving her first child, her husband loses a woman in childbirth, is traumatized and decides to go off to London to help victims of the German bombings. He's unaware that Emma is pregnant. While he's there, he meets up with Frankie who witnesses his tragic, meaningless death. Frankie becomes the keeper of a letter for Emma and she eventually decides to got to Franklin to deliver it. In the meantime, the doctor had left Iris with a letter for Emma in case he was killed in London. Iris intercepts a letter for Emma that suggests her husband was killed. But both Iris and Frankie tiptoe around the issue of the doctor's death until a telegram comes officially bearing the bad news. The end.

As I said, it's a plot tortured from the surroundings, entirely artificial and fairly tedious to get through. After finishing the book, I felt cheated out of a good story. The backdrop of WWII is so inherently dramatic that intrigue, suspense and emotion should ooze out of a story like this. Instead, Blake takes a fascinating backdrop and clogs it with the tale of a housewife sitting at home, twiddling her thumbs, waiting for news. If I wanted to read about bored, pregnant ladies irrationally bitter that their husbands are at work, I'd write an autobiography.

The story awkwardly jumps from wartime Europe to an America gearing up for war and the rest of the plot isn't strong enough to prevent the whiplash from that transition. The characters aren't particularly compelling or well developed. Blake has potential to be a great writer. This attempt fell far short of great and it's doomed to be forgotten within a year or two.