My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You

Product Information

Young shines in writing about their world and their surroundings, far less their characters and inner workings. I liked reading her chapters, even though I found her to be ridiculous and vain (though I think that was more due to women of her class in that time). Worried that her husband is slipping away, Julia is left alone with her fears when Rose joins the nursing corps to work with a pioneering plastic surgeon treating wounded and disfigured soldiers. It did a very good job of conveying the various facets of war, the experience for those in the trenches, in the hospitals and stranded at home.

Other themes explored are class mobility and gender, although these can never be avoided when writing a book based in world war 1. My Dear I Wanted to Tell You’ takes its title from a letter writing format designed to encourage young soldiers to express their feelings on the page and vent their thoughts. The passionate recounting of early plastic surgery -- the vanities AND the essential reconstructive work -- are also fascinating -- and make 1917 seem not so very far away.And there are two witchy witchy mothers that would seem monstrously misogynist if written by a man -- Young's gentle touch fails her there. Granted, this is probably my own weakness, but when too many names are thrown at me at once, I tend to block them all out. It left you—well , it never left you: it rendered you brutalized, incapable, unthinking, unfeeling, scar tissue all over.

This storyline however was diluted juxtaposed against the unravelling of Julia and Peter’s relationship, and Rose’s lack of marital options, without which I suspect this novel wouldn’t have worked. I realize that she did this as a means of illustrating the changes in the characters life, but none the less it made me a little crazy.I have read very little about The Great War, so I cannot make good comparisons in literature about this era. Would probably have benefited from deciding what it was - literary (less plot, more navel-gazing) or genre (more plot, less navel-gazing) and sticking with it.