My book, Children’s Wartime Adventure Novels, is now available in paperback at the Broadside Bookshop in Northampton. A non-fiction study of teen and pre-teen novels published during World War II, includes two stories with settings local to western Massachusetts.
During World War II, Smith College in Northampton was a training camp for WAVES. The story of female midshipmen is recounted by one of its graduates, Lieutenant (J.G.) Helen Hull Jacobs in By Your Leave, Sir – The Story of a Wave. A troubled young woman seeks a place in the war effort, and we follow her and her classmates through locations throughout Northampton. They attend classes at Faunce Hall, are billeted at Capen House and the Hotel Northampton, and Wiggins Tavern is frequented in their off hours. The novel is an interesting look at the life of women in Navy training at this time, and also for a glimpse at Northampton as it served this unique position in America’s war effort.
A similar experience awaited another young woman in South Hadley, where Mount Holyoke College was the site of training for WAVES as well as for Women Marines. Lady Leatherneck, written by First Lieutenant Barbara A. White, MCWR is similar to By Your Leave, Sir, in that the author is herself a woman in the service, in this case, the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, and also is based on the author’s own real-life experiences. Both stories show a surprising, for the era, feminist streak in the books for girls.
From a BookLife review in Publishers Weekly: "Lynch illuminates a fascinating, little-studied chapter of publishing history…protagonists in their late teens and early 20s set aside the anxieties of youth to do their part to stomp out fascism. In title after title, pilots and soldiers (the men, mostly) and nurses, reporters, WACs, WASPS, WAVES, and more (the women) evince courage, endurance, dedication to the cause, and a savvy sense for identifying fifth columnists. Lynch celebrates the novels' sense of ‘spirited adventure’ and ethos of ‘patriotic self-sacrifice’ while digging into thorny questions of propaganda and indoctrination, including racial and ethnic stereotyping…”
Children’s Wartime Adventure Novels is
available in print and eBook online, and now in paperback at the Broadside
Bookshop, 247 Main Street, Northampton.
It is also available online from Bookshop.org (Children’s Wartime Adventure Novels – hardcover - https://bookshop.org/a/116354/9798330314133
Children’s Wartime Adventure Novels – paperback - https://bookshop.org/a/116354/9798330314942)
It is also available from IngramSpark (hardcover), and in paperback.
And from Amazon in both paperback and hardcover.
It's also in eBook at Amazon, and from a variety of online shops.
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