I recently got to be part of my friend, Faith Colburn's street team for her latest book, Gravy. Here is my review.
Connor, fresh from the Pacific, is finishing out his enlistment as an MP on the army base outside of Colorado Springs recovering from a bad case of malaria and trying to deal with his PTSD.
Bobbie, a WAC, has spent much of WWII repairing radios in
planes and singing at a lounge in Colorado Springs in her off time.
The pair hit it off, after overcoming a few roadblocks and
manage to fall in love, even though both of them have one foot out of the
relationship: Connor and his uncertain mental situation after serving in the
Pacific, and Bobbie with her desire to return to the road singing with big
bands and her uncertainty of farm life. But they decided that they loved each
other enough that blow ups and forgone dreams wouldn’t stand in their way of making
a go of it.
The couple work hard to make a normal life for themselves in
Nebraska but the fear of Connor’s blow ups intensify when Bobbie is put through
a traumatic pregnancy and labor that they fear damaged their daughter.
The fear of hurting the baby more and the inability to be a
good mother sends Bobbie running and Connor struggling to understand how
exactly their life together fell apart.
Gravy is the final book in a trilogy, the first, The
Reluctant Canary Sings, chronicles Bobbie’s life in Cleveland, OH as a big band
singer during the Great Depression. The second, See Willie See, is about
Connor’s time with the Army in Panama and the Pacific with flashbacks to his
life on the farm in Nebraska and his time tramping around the American west during
the Great Depression.
Faith’s extraordinary ability to fill her books full of
historically accurate details without bogging down the story never fails to wow
me. Her characters are multi-dimensional and interesting without ever feeling
fake. Their actions are completely in-character and the reader fully
understands why they’re doing what they’re doing without needing huge
info-dumps to get there.
While the beginning is a little slow going to set up all of
the back story and the story’s moving parts, Gravy quickly becomes a
steamroller that you can’t stop reading. The need to know what happens next and
the will-they-won’t-they will keep you turning pages long after you should have
gone to bed.
I feel that the overarching theme of the book is trauma, how
it can come from different places, and affect people differently. Also, how important
communication with loved ones about it is in order to maintain relationships
and understand how it affects everybody.
Gravy is a wonderful conclusion to this WWII/family drama
where two people work hard to overcome their own traumas to support each other
and their family, making plenty of mistakes along the way but finally realizing
what they ultimately want is to be together.
I highly recommend reading the entire trilogy, all three books are wonderful. The books are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and Kobo.
Faith's website: https://prairiewindpress.us/
