The Marriage of Opposites, by Alice Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, 2015

I have loved pretty much every book Alice Hoffman has written, so I was excited to receive this one for early review. For the most part, I was not disappointed.

In 1817, on the small Caribbean island of St. Thomas, teen aged Rachel Pomie, member of the small Jewish community, is told by her father that he has arranged a marriage for her. Her father and the prospective groom wish to merge their businesses, and the groom, thirty years older than Rachel, is a recent widower with three small children. Despite her dreams of going to Paris, Rachel enters the marriage with surprising dignity and maturity. Now she is trapped on St. Thomas.

Luckily Monsieur Isaac Petit is a man ahead of his time. He loved his first wife and is gentle and thoughtful with Rachel, viewing her as a partner in the job of raising a family.  Rachel makes friends with the Petit’s maid, as well as with the ghost of the first Mrs. Petit. But when Isaac suddenly dies, she finds herself alone with seven children, and no money- in their community, women cannot inherit anything. Everything she has thought she owned is now the property of Isaac’s family in France. A nephew will be sent to sort things out and run the business. Rachel finds this infuriating.

When the nephew- several years Rachel’s junior- appears, they fall in love. According to their community’s laws, they are family even though there is no blood shared between them, and thus cannot marry. Shunned when they have an affair despite lack of blessing from a rabbi, Rachel moves heaven and earth to obtain the blessing of the rabbi and be married after several years of effort. Anything can be done for love.

Which is why it is so ironic that when their youngest son, Camille Pizarro who will be acclaimed as the father of Impressionism, falls in love with the cook’s daughter, Rachel refuses to give her blessing to the match. The girls is both working class and not Jewish.

This is not just the story of Rachel and her husbands. It’s also about the love between sisters- even when the sister cannot be acknowledged; parental love; love that must be kept hidden; the horror of slavery; the lack of women’s rights in the 19^th century; the persecution of Jews; and magic. There is a lot going on in this story, on several levels. It’s told so beautifully that the story leapt into my mind in glowing color. St. Thomas is a place of incredible physical beauty and the sense of place, both there and in Paris, is very important to the story. I have to admit that while Rachel is a very sympathetic character in the first portion, she is much less so later on, and we have no way of knowing why she changes so. But people do change when the shoe is on the other foot. A wonderful story that held me totally. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from the Vine program in return for a fair review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.  

GI Brides: The wartime girls who crossed the Atlantic for love, by Duncan Barrett & Nuala Calvi. William Morrow 2014

When America entered WW 2, many soldiers were sent to England as a staging ground for attacks on the continent. With many British men already fighting in Europe (or wounded or dead), the influx of relatively well paid young GIs found a country full of young women willing to date them. With the threat of battle immanent, both men and women grabbed at happiness and married without knowing each other well at all. When the war ended and the GIs were sent home, their young brides went with them- on separate ships, of course, and with a lot of indignities. What they found when the arrived on US shores wasn’t what they’d expected.

Calvi’s grandmother was one of these GI brides, and she learned Margaret’s story not long before her grandmother’s death. This led to looking into the lives of other war brides. Four of them; Rae, Margaret, Sylvia and Gwendolyn (Lyn) have their stories shared with us here.

One found herself married to an alcoholic who spent every penny he made (and then some) on alcohol, finally becoming abusive. Another married a compulsive gambler with PTSD. One’s family didn’t take to her at first at all and seemed to deliberately make her life miserable, and she contracted polio on top of that. Another’s husband was womanizer. They all had culture shock and found that even the English language wasn’t the same in the US as it was in England. The image of America that many had was of relative wealth, and it wasn’t always so. Not all the GI brides had horrible marriages; even after rocky starts, some remained happily married for a lifetime. But they all had to be incredibly strong to survive what they did. Some of them were only teenagers when they married and left their homes.

I loved this book. Social history is fascinating to me, and I’m glad these stories are being told before that generation dies off. Each chapter is about a different one of the four, going in rounds. I confess that I sometimes had a little trouble with that format; I’d forget what the one I was reading had done in her last couple of chapters. I managed, though; it’s not hard to flip back and take a look. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents. This book was given to me by the Amazon Vine program in return for a fair review. Neither of these things influenced my review.