Every scenario seems implausible until it actually happens, as any military planner knows. When newspaper reporter Carmela Jean \u201cCJ\u201d Martino and her new husband, Lt. Joe Delano of the U.S. Marine Corps, get married in Waikiki on December 5, 1941, the pace of Japanese aggression feels distant, at best. CJ is more concerned about what types of food they\u2019ll order for their wedding celebration, and Joe professes greater worry about local spies than a Japanese air attack. When someone mentions rumors of a military operation, he replies, \u201cThat\u2019s ridiculous. How the hell are they going to fly in? Where are they going to fly from?\u201d He comes to regret such overconfidence; soon, Joe, CJ, and their friends go from laid-back dinner outings to a world of martial law, military censorship, and the temporary use of restaurant freezers to store the dead. At first, CJ finds an outlet through her reporting job at the Honolulu Advertiser,\u00a0but soon feels the pull of a higher calling with the Women\u2019s Air Raid Defense, a civilian unit. Buckingham\u2019s wartime novel fits snugly beside such genre benchmarks as James Jones\u2019 From Here to Eternity\u00a0(1951) and Herman Wouk\u2019s The Winds of War (1971), which are also both set in Hawaii, before and after Pearl Harbor. What makes this novel compelling is the author\u2019s exploration of women\u2019s perspectives on these events, which is often lost amid textbook images of WACs and WAVEs. CJ and her friends, Eve Russell (whose family owns the Advertiser) and Ruth Elliott, the wife of a Navy commander, must convince an entrenched, male-dominated establishment that they can endure the physical and mental challenges that accompany military secrecy, endless working hours, and grinding sequestration, and such narratives are not often seen in fiction. The novel impressively and artfully realizes its themes of duty and self-sacrifice during wartime, as well.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every scenario seems implausible until it actually happens, as any military planner knows. When newspaper reporter Carmela Jean \u201cCJ\u201d Martino and her new husband, Lt. Joe Delano of the U.S. Marine Corps, get married in Waikiki on December 5, 1941, the pace of Japanese aggression feels distant, at best. CJ is more concerned about what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}