Title: Letters Never SentAuthor: Sandra MoranReview:Joan is reeling from the death of her estranged mother. It is 1997 and everything is falling apart around her even as she begins to pick up the pieces of her mother’s life. She doesn’t want to be there—her mother resented her and now all the old feelings are coming back. As she walks through the door to her mother’s house and begins the process that comes with sifting through the evidence of the passage of years, she learns that not everything is as it appears. Sometimes you don’t know the people in your life at all.Katherine is stuck in a small town in the 1930’s. She is bored and wants more than anything to see the sights of Chicago and have a future far from the existence everyone has planned for her. Marry. Have children. Be the woman the family expects her to be. She rebels and goes to Chicago and gets a job as a sales clerk at Sears. There, she meets Annie and her life would forever be changed. In a world where things were often in black and white, loving a woman was unheard of—unnatural. Katherine has some hard choices to make. Will she chose the hard road ahead and follow her heart or retreat back to the seemingly safe world her family wants her to return to. In the present, Joan finds a box of letters and discovers her mother had secrets of her own—an affair. Who is the mysterious “A” and what happened all those years ago? Why was her mother so very angry all the time? In a heart wrenching journey, we move back and forth between the present and the past, getting to know Katherine and her daughter Joan as they each cope with their own personal demons. This book captivated me from the beginning. The grasp of language and characters made the story leap off the pages. Annie, Katherine and Joan became real, breathing people. The culture of the time is brought to life as we journey with Katherine from the countryside of Kansas to the city life in Chicago at the time of the first World’s Fair. Her awakening to the “forbidden” love of her friend is a painful process for both her and for Annie. As their relationship evolves over time and constraints are put on Katherine’s life, a love that will never be extinguished is born. As the plot thickens and the mention of a murder is hinted at, the race to find out the truth becomes something that Joan has to know just as the frayed ends of her own life begin to unravel before her. Is she just like her mother? Does she have the courage it takes to make the right choices for her and her family? All of it is tied to a murder mystery forty years in the making—one that will change the very fabric of Katherine’s and Joan’s lives in more ways than they could ever expect.I don’t think I have ever blazed through a book so fast in my life. The play back and forth between the present and past was electrifying and as a reader, I had to know more. Now. What would you do if you found out your mother was having an affair? What if everything you ever thought about her was wrong? It is sobering. Do we really ever know the people around us? Probably not. The book also explores the very real social stigma that came with being different. If you were a lesbian, you were considered unnatural and shunned. Author Sandra Moran does an excellent job of illustrating the violence and hurt that bubble just under the surface in families when one of their own does not follow the prescribed plan. This book connected with me on so many levels. Women in that time were expected to be wives and mothers, catering to their husbands in every way. When a woman dares to try and do something different, she is punished. It still holds true to some extent today, but the women that came before us felt the brunt of it. There were other cultural aspects of being a woman in the 1930’s. If you were a “loose woman” and found yourself in trouble, you didn’t have safe places to go to “fix” the problem. You had butchers that killed women because of their ignorance. The heart wrenching reality was sobering.In every way this book was a five star out of five. Emotion, characters, dialog, social message-everything. I loved it and can’t wait for the next one. Maybe by then I will have caught up on my sleep.5/5Erzabet Bishop It is interesting to consider how much we take our equality and freedoms as women for granted in this 21st century.In Letters Never Sent, Moran pulls us into a different era where working women were looked down upon as inferior; a time when back room abortionists were as common as cold water flats. The love story between Kate and Annie begins much as their day at the Chicago World's Fair, with much hope and promise and anticipation of great things to come.Kate struggles with her desire to conform to her family and societies expectations while knowing that what she feels for Annie is real and true. The author does a masterful job of conveying this uncertainty on Kate's part with the frustration felt by Annie. This is not an easy book to read. It makes us all stop and consider how often the comments we make and the actions we take are weighed with that human desire to blend in and not be singled out. I tend to read only contemporary romance but I found myself drawn to the story as it unfolds in the early decades of the 20h century. The modern scenes with Joan were necessary but did not leave as big an impression on me and I kept racing through those scenes to return to the past.A bittersweet but thought provoking read. A great debut for an author I will read again.
What do You think about Letters Never Sent (2013)?
Read for book club, seemed very one dimensional and repetitive.
—doodle
Great story! I really enjoyed this one. Very well written.
—jdlfc
