When Evie's father returns from WWII, the family fell back into its normal life pretty quickly. But Joe Spooner brought more back with him than war stories. When movie-star handsome Peter Coleridge, a young ex-GI who served in Joe's company in post-war Austria shows up, Evie is suddenly caught in a complicated web of lies that she only slowly recognizes. She finds herself falling for Peter, ignoring the secrets that surround him. . . until a tragedy occurs that shatters her family and breaks her life in two.
As she begins to realize that almost everything she believed to be a truth was really a lie, Evie must get to the heart of the deceptions and choose between loyalty to her parents and feelings for the man she loves. Someone will have to be betrayed. The question is. . . who?
I don't really need to tell you how good this book is, as it's a National Book Award winner (beating out, inter alia, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, and a new one by Laurie Halse Anderson (which I may read next, now!)). Right from the first sentence, this grabbed me:
"The match snapped, then sizzled, and I woke up fast. I heard my mother inhale as she took a long pull on a cigarette. Her lips stuck on the filter, so I knew she was still wearing lipstick. She'd been up all night."
That description is incredible. I actually re-read that first sentence about five times, because I could hear, in my mind, the snap and sizzle of the match. That depth of description never falters, either. The period details of What I Saw are faultless - as far as I can tell, having never actually been to Florida in 1947. The details are pitch-perfect, the tone of the speech, the articles of clothing, the slang and the references (the nerdy boys are 'Poindexters', one man gets out of the war through a 'bum ticker', Evie's mother is compared to Lana Turner, and Evie's just watched Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun, and listened to Amanda of Honeymoon Hill growing up) - they all work to create the atmosphere. They are obscure without being frustrating. There was actually, only one thing that irritated me about this facet of the book, and that was the (to me) over-inundation of cigarette- and smoking- related references. It felt a little like someone was hitting me over the head with them, saying, look how common it used to be to smoke. It really only bugged in one particular case, when Evie is smoking in the car with a fellow hotel guest, and "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)" is playing on the radio. Which, to be fair, was the #1 song in July, 1947. But it still feels a little like it's done more for show than realism. My mother, however, assures me that she never even noticed all the smoking references, immune as she is to them after growing up in the 60s. So maybe it's not that far off from reality. Younger readers might be similarly thrown out of the story though.
Next: the Characters! Peter and Evie and Joe, oh my! Like all good mysteries, the cast of characters is small, memorable, and secretive. Everyone is hiding something, some people are hiding more than one thing, and, unlike in the biblical days (see Matthew 10:26), not everything hidden shall be uncovered, nor every secret made known. The cast is presented with empathy, as no one is evil all the time (sort of) and each person's motivations make them more realistic and sympathetic. The problem is that each person is being backed into a corner, from which the only escape is through the destruction of someone else. So there's some good tension there. In fact, the only character that I got sick of, was Evie. Evie, Evie, Evie, with her idiotic fifteen year old naivety and truer-than-true-love mindset. As soon as Evie meets Peter, the handsome young GI, she's sunk - and so are we. Now we get to listen to pages of her inner thoughts about whether or not he likes her, how to dress to impress him, stalking him, etc. etc. The difference is palpable. For instance, before she meets Peter, she has a dark sense of humor about herself:
"But I saw their glances slide off me, like ugly was Vaseline and I was coated with it."Hey, I thought it was funny. It's certainly a very striking image. After she meets Peter, her caliber of rational thinking takes a steep dive:
" 'I wish a lot of things,' [Peter] said, "and one of them is, I wish you were back in that house, with your battle-axe Grandma Glad."
It sounded like the most romantic thing anyone could say. As if we were falling in love, and we knew it was wrong, but we'd do it anyway. We'd follow our foolish hearts. We'd listen to the crazy moon."
Yeah, uh huh, the moon isn't the only crazy thing in this scene. I guess it's a compliment, that Evie's willful refusal to believe this isn't true love gets under my skin so much. But seriously - Evie is 15, Peter is 23, he's just been through the war, he's obviously got some weird thing going on with Joe, her father. There is no good reason for world-weary older men to find young naive (and in this case, pre-pubescent) girls attractive. Reasons for this are always bad, a la Jane Eyre or Rebecca. Do you want to go through what the second Mrs. deWinter had to go through? Do you, Evie? And that shit came out in 1938, don't tell me you didn't read it. I bet you thought it was romantic.
Now, I don't want to spoil the end too much, although let me say that parts of it, wonderfully, cannot be spoiled. But I would like to say that Evie is redeemed in my eyes (if still kind of ridiculously, wilfully dumb in some Peter-related areas). You're left wondering, about 3/4 of the way through, how this is possibly going to end, as every page brings fresh entangelements. But the denouement is skillfully managed. You never lose sight of the way all the little scenes from the book fit into the overall assembly, as they're given first one construction, then another. All in all, a very well done book, with an impeccable, uh, set design? It starts out a little slow, but don't lose hope - the ending is worth it.
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