{"id":4830,"date":"2023-03-11T06:45:55","date_gmt":"2023-03-11T14:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4830"},"modified":"2023-03-11T06:45:55","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T14:45:55","slug":"lauren-willig-two-wars-and-a-wedding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/lauren-willig-two-wars-and-a-wedding\/","title":{"rendered":"Lauren Willig: Two Wars and a Wedding"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Lauren Willig\u2019s new novel blooms from one of her recent books, Band of Sisters <\/em>(2021) which followed a group of Smith College grads as they made their intrepid way to France to lend a hand during WWI in 1917.\u00a0 Willig became intrigued with their leader and this book\u2019s central character is based on her \u2013 another Smith grad who trained in archeology, was denied \u201cdig\u201d time in Greece because of her sex, and turned to humanitarian work and war nursing.<\/p>\n

Willig\u2019s fictional creation, Betsy Hayes, has just arrived in Athens in 1896 hoping to excavate.\u00a0 The classicist in charge tells her to try being a librarian; she finds lodging with a swanky titled Greek woman who knew her father, gets around town on her bicycle, and manages to get on some archaeological tours with the male students.\u00a0 Along the way she encounters a dashing French Count and falls hard even though (gasp, though not a surprise) he\u2019s inconveniently married.\u00a0 Ultimately, her frustrations become so great she decides to try war nursing.\u00a0 Recommended by the Queen of Greece, she heads to the front, in what was the short lived Greco-Turkish war of 1897.\u00a0 Short lived, but with no shortage of horror.<\/p>\n

Betsy ends up running a small hospital, working about 24 hours a day, and seeing scores of wounded men, some of whom she can\u2019t help.\u00a0 Willig has structured the book so it goes back and forth in time, and slightly in the future, she\u2019s serving as a nurse during the Spanish-American war in Cuba, on the heels of Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s Rough Riders.\u00a0 This is not a mystery but there is a mystery in the plot \u2013 why is Betsy in Florida, headed to Cuba?\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t she stay in Greece?\u00a0 The book spools out the answers but it takes until near the end for the reader to put the pieces together.<\/p>\n

The war in Cuba seems almost worse, though there are certainly commonalities.\u00a0 Betsy is more confident in her nursing skills, and she needs them, as the US Military are no more enlightened than Classics professors when it comes to women on the field of battle.\u00a0 Clara Barton is leading the charge and she\u2019s refused by the US military, so she sets up shop with the Cubans.\u00a0 Necessity eventually finds its way as the battle intensifies, however, and it\u2019s not long before Betsy is tending to some of the Yale boys she\u2019d known in college.<\/p>\n

While Willig has based her character on a real woman, she\u2019s a powerful writer and a wonderful portraitist, so much so that Betsy Hayes practically leaps off the page and into your soul.\u00a0 She\u2019s so alive.\u00a0 When Betsy eventually heads home from Cuba it\u2019s on a ship that\u2019s not at all equipped for any kind of medical transport, and the patients they are transporting are stuffed into hellishly hot cubicles below decks.\u00a0 It\u2019s Betsy who is able to organize and drag the men back to the states, alive, and to actual medical care, and if you aren\u2019t practically cheering for her when she disembarks in New York, there\u2019s something the matter with you.<\/p>\n

This is a true epic, and there\u2019s of course also a romance involved (see the title).\u00a0 As the ultimate love of Betsy\u2019s is not at all obvious, I won\u2019t give things away, but will let the lucky reader discover for themselves where Betsy\u2019s heart ultimately takes her.\u00a0 There\u2019s a nice historical afterword (my knowledge of the Spanish American war was very small), and it\u2019s fun to see how Willig wove history into fictional gold.\u00a0 This is a spectacular read. —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

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Lauren Willig\u2019s new novel blooms from one of her recent books, Band of Sisters (2021) which followed a group of Smith College grads as they made their intrepid way to France to lend a hand during WWI in 1917.\u00a0 Willig became intrigued with their leader and this book\u2019s central character is based on her \u2013 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1078,1079,513,1076,10,131,1075,1077,291],"class_list":["post-4830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1896-greece","tag-1898-cuba","tag-band-of-sisters","tag-greco-turkish-war","tag-historical","tag-lauren-willig","tag-spanish-american-war","tag-wartime-nursing","tag-william-morrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4830"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4833,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4830\/revisions\/4833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}