This week I’m pleased to bring you the latest from my friend Allie Pleiter! I’m reading her new book right now, Homefront Hero, featured here. I always enjoy Allie’s work, but I’m especially enjoying this one because of her choice to use one of my favorite settings—all the drama of the First World War. I also couldn’t help but notice the use of the classic name Maureen for one of the supporting characters . . . Surely that was a stroke of genius!
🙂
Here’s a note from Allie, followed by a brief excerpt so you can see why I enjoy reading Allie’s books:
The Lure of the Great War
Wars aren’t really alluring. They do, however, bring the human condition to its peaks, both good and bad. War rips apart lives and sets apart heroes. War shakes up societies and redraws borders–both the social and the geographical. It’s a great time to set a book, because without conflict there can be no good drama.
Lover of the underdog that I am, I liked using WWI as a setting because I thought WWII was getting all the attention. I was drawn to the idea that many people thought WWI spelled the end of the world as we know it.
I was startled when I came across the true medical memo described in HOMEFRONT HERO. A doctor projects that if the number of Spanish Influenza cases continue to increase at their current rate, it could essentially spell the end of the human race. Of course, we know that wasn’t the case, but think about what it was like to live during that scare–people truly felt the world might be coming to an end. What drama! What a chance for our hero and heroine to act in new ways!
Here’s an excerpt from the opening of the book:
Camp Jackson Army Base Columbia, South Carolina September 1918
“I still can’t believe it.” Leanne Sample gazed around at the busy activity of Camp Jackson. Even with all she’d heard and seen while studying nursing at nearby University of South Carolina, the encampment stunned her. This immense property had only recently been mere sand, pine and brush. Now nearly a thousand buildings created a self-contained city. She was part of that city. Part of the monumental military machine poised to train and treat the boys going to and coming from “over there.” She was a staff nurse at the base army hospital. “We’re really here.”
“Unless I’m seein’ things, we most definitely are here.” Ida Landway, Leanne’s fellow nurse and roommate at the Red Cross House where they and other newer nurses were housed, elbowed her. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes, but I still can barely believe this place wasn’t even here two years ago.” Together they stared at the layout of the orderly, efficient streets and structures, rows upon rows of new buildings standing in formation like their soldier occupants. “It’s a grand, impressive thing, Camp Jackson. Makes me proud.”
Leanne had known Ida briefly during their study program at the university, but now that they were officially installed at the camp, Leanne already knew her prayers for a good friend in the nursing corps had been answered. Different as night and day, Leanne still had found Ida a fast and delightful companion. Ida’s sense of humor was often the perfect antidote to the stresses of military base life. As such, their settling in at the Red Cross House and on the hospital staff had whooshed by her in a matter of days, and been much easier than she’d expected.
Still, “on-staff” nursing life was tiring. “There was so much to do,” Leanne said to Ida as she tilted her face to the early fall sunshine as they chatted with other nurses on the hillside out in front of the Red Cross House. “Too many things are far more complicated in real service then I ever found them in class.”
“A free afternoon. I was wondering if we’d ever get one. Gracious, I remember thinking our class schedules were hard.” Ida rolled her shoulders. “Hard has a whole new meaning to me now.” This afternoon had been their first stretch of free time, and they’d decided to spend an hour doing absolutely nothing before taking the trolley into Columbia to attend a war rally on the USC campus that evening.
“However are you going to have time to do this?” Ida pointed to a notice of base hospital events pinned to a post outside the Red Cross House. “I feel like I’ve barely time to breathe, and you’re already lined up to teach knitting classes.”
“I’ve managed to find the time to teach you,” Leanne reminded her newest student.
“Don’t I know it. I tell you, my mama’s jaw would drop if she saw I’ve already learned to knit. I guess you’ve found right where you fit in the scheme of things around here.”
Ida was right; Leanne had found her place on base almost instantly. As if God had known just where to slot her in, placing an opening for a teacher in the Red Cross sock knitting campaign. If there was anything Leanne knew for certain she could do, it was to knit socks for soldiers. She’d run classes for her schoolmates at the university; it seemed easy as pie to do the same thing here. And it would help her make friends so quickly—hadn’t she already? In only a matter of days the vastness of the base seemed just a wide-open ocean of possibilities.
The Specifics:
Homefront Hero, by Allie Pleiter
A Love Inspired Historical
May 2012
#978-0-373-82916-3
From the back cover:
Dashing and valiantly wounded, Captain John Gallows could have stepped straight out of an army recruitment poster. Leanne Sample can’t help being impressed—although the lovely Red Cross nurse tries to hide it. She knows better than to get attached to the daring captain who is only home to heal and help rally support for the war’s final push. As soon as he’s well enough, he’ll rush back to Europe, back to war—and far away from South Carolina and Leanne. But when an epidemic strikes close to home, John comes to realize what it truly means to be a hero—Leanne’s hero.
About Allie:
An avid knitter, coffee junkie, and devoted chocoholic, Allie Pleiter writes both fiction and non-fiction. The enthusiastic but slightly untidy mother of two, Allie spends her days writing books, buying yarn, and finding new ways to avoid housework. Allie hails from Connecticut, moved to the midwest to attend Northwestern University, and currently lives outside Chicago, Illinois. The “dare from a friend” to begin writing has produced two parenting books, fourteen novels, and various national speaking engagements on faith, women’s issues, and writing. Visit her website at www.alliepleiter.comor her knitting blog at www.DestiKNITions.blogspot.com
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