Presenting Pauline: a memoir by Pauline Fraser "as told to" Louise Brass

A war bride who worked in comedy revues and nightclubs before and during the war, as a child, teenager and young adult, and who also worked in Hollywood recounts her memories and her brushes with greatness.

When Pauline was a child, Margaret Thatcher's father owned a grocery down the road from her grandmother's house and she played with Margaret.  As a teenager, she went to school with Judy Garland.  As a film stand-in, she had tea with Glynis Johns.  She had a flirtation with British espionage during the war, before her mother put a stop to it.  She worked in a pantomime produced by a member of the Astor family.

Here's my favorite passage in the book, from pp. 106-107:

One summer evening in 1940, when the war was heating up, my mother and I were home alone, and she was cooking in the kitchen, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke on the radio.  His famous speech was being broadcasted about how we would all fight with anything and everything in our power to stop the aggressors, if they dared to invade our homeland.

His voice came across the airwaves in his heavy, guttural, determined "growl" that had become so familiar to the British people:  "..We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.  We shall fight on the beaches.  We shall fight on the landing grounds.  We shall fight in the field and in the streets.  We shall fight in the hills.  We shall never surrender!"\

My mother stopped what she was doing, looked at me doubtfully and said, sarcastically, "Oh yer .. oh fine."

But I was really flustered by the possibility.

"What will we do if the Germans invade England?  What are we going to do?" I asked her. "Supposing the Germans do land and they march down Charing Cross Road, and come up here and knock on the door?"

She went to the kitchen counter and pulled out a drawer and took out two sharp knives.  "I've got two knives here, one for you and one for me," she said.  "If they come through that door we get as many as we can."

I felt relieved knowing what I was supposed to do.  I felt better knowing there was a plan, even if it could have ended in a blood bath.  The plan that I was to knife as many Nazis as I can, and get it over with quickly.  Luckily, I didn't have to do that.

The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

This is fiction, but just barely.  It's a somewhat impressionistic group portrait of the women married to scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico.  This is the lab where the atomic bomb was developed.

J. Francis Oppenheimer makes an appearance here, viewed through wifely eyes.  Much of this novel is concerned with domestic life and the difficulty of making a life in a new place, far from friends and family, while loved ones are serving in the armed forces, often overseas, and while letters are censored, family visits are forbidden, and security concerns govern everything. The wives were often not told where they were going when they set off for New Mexico; while some wives may have known what "the husbands" were working on, it was never discussed (at least not in the pages of this novel).

I am reading this for my book group and I predict it will not be popular with the group.  One member has already said that it doesn't have any plot.  Of course it does.  Victories in Europe and defeats in the Pacific are the rising action; the climax is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The denounement is packing up and going "home," and realizing the Los Alamos has become home and will be missed.  I didn't really enjoy it very much, but I'm sure that that may be in part because I was compelled to read it for my book group. Compulsion sometimes takes the joy out of things that would otherwise be enjoyable, as any of the Los Alamos wives could very easily point out.

The author writes in her acknowledgment that the idea grew out of a comment from an audience member when she presented some research on Los Alamos and the commenter wanted to know about the lives of the wives.  Many of the wives had bachelor's or even advanced degrees in math and the sciences, but they mostly accepted the mores of their day and accepted their "careers" as wives and mothers.  Nesbit portrays the wives as mildly disliking the few women scientists there, who because of their status, got bathtubs.

I thought of the showers there when I was washing off poison ivy oil today.  Water was not reliable; sometimes women would open the tap to get water for coffee and brown muck would come out. They were advised to take something I think may have been called the "Good Citizen Shower," when, to conserve water, they were advised to soap up before getting into the shower - only to find themselves covered with cold, sticky soap when no water came out of the shower head.

The Things We Save by Joanne Zienty

This novel is a self-published debut novel, and it is also the winner of the 2014 Soon-To-Be-Famous Illinois Author Project.

Claire Sokol is the child of first-generation Polish-American immigrants.  Her father is a WWII veteran and a steel worker on the South Side of Chicago.   Her family is a typical baby boom family until tragedy hits her family, leading to a slow unraveling of family ties and a series of traumatic events that rip the family apart and led Claire first to turn her back on her family and to develop a self-protective coldness, fear of intimacy and inability to commit.  Her situation is one that many of us feel; unable to process our childhood losses and to forgive our parents, we turn our concern to our adult lives, aware or unaware of the way those issues shape us and our actions going forward.

I just finished it on Monday, and I really enjoyed it.  I can't quite separate my feelings about the virtues of the novel from my admiration for the author, or the clever way that she used numerous pop culture references to give the reader a sense of "you are there."