The Heroes' Welcome

March 2, 2015
This swing volume in Young's engaging WWI-era trilogy picks up where My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You ended, just months after the armistice. Now, each of the finely drawn main characters has to figure out how to get past the horrors of the Great War and accept the changes it has brought. Young Riley Purefoy, a working-class boy elevated to captain during the war, faces the biggest challenge: living with a disfiguring facial wound. Riley meets this new world head-on. He marries his childhood sweetheart, the wealthy Nadine Waveney, who served as a nurse during the war, and searches for a suitable occupation. Meanwhile, Peter Locke, Riley's former commanding officer, tries to blunt his memories of the trenches with alcohol, ignoring his devoted wife, Julia, and their young son. While Peter and Julia seem stuck in the past, Peter's sister, Rose, still working as a nurse, is determined to become a new woman of the postwar period, dedicated to career rather than family. Parts of the plot seem a bit Downton Abbeyish, but Young manages to create characters who project an appealing combination of melancholy and moxie, imbuing her story with such quiet power that readers will be anxiously awaiting the final installment.

January 15, 2015
In the middle novel of Young's projected World War I trilogy, a disfigured British soldier and the officer he saved face arduous struggles, as do the women they left behind.The story is set in 1919, six months after the conflict ended. Riley Purefoy, who has aged well beyond his 23 years, must cope with a blown-off jaw that has rendered him barely able to speak and unable to enjoy intimacy with the plucky, adoring Nadine. After he marries her at the start of the book, he also has to cope with her disapproving parents. His friend and best man, Peter, the officer, has descended into alcoholism to shut off traumatic memories of his failures on the battlefront. His wife, Julia, uses a chemical treatment in an attempt to make herself more attractive to him and ends up defiling her natural beauty; she's so devastated by his rejection that she leaves for Biarritz. The book centers on Riley's slow emotional and physical healing. Once again, he becomes the self-punishing Peter's only hope for survival. Painfully kept secrets unravel. A troubled pregnancy darkens the narrative. For fans of Downton Abbey, there is much to enjoy in Young's skillful plotting and sometimes-heartbreaking story, though she avoids the soap operatic trimmings of the TV show. From the start, the author is in exquisite control, beautifully balancing modest moments with dramatic ones. Having invested in Young's characters in the superb My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You (2011), we care even more about them the second time around. One looks forward to reading the final installment.

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February 15, 2015
It's 1919, and the characters Young introduced in My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You (2011) are trying to adjust to peacetime life. Both Riley Purefoy and his commanding officer, Peter Locke, have come home wounded, but while Riley's wounds are ineluctably visiblehis jaw had to be reconstructedPeter's wounds are not. Consumed by guilt over losing most of his men, he walls himself off from his family and escapes into alcohol and Homer's works. Not knowing how to help him, his beautiful but insecure wife, Julia, bolts for Biarritz. Riley and Nadine, the upper-class girl he fell in love with before the war, are newly married and, after a revelatory honeymoon on the continent, return to build a life together. Peter and Julia are not so lucky. And Peter's cousin, Rose, decides to turn her wartime nursing experience into a career in medicine, a story arc that awaits development in a projected third novel. Young affectingly charts the toll war continues to take long after the soldiers have left the battlefield.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)