The Fire By Night
WWII on both the European and Pacific fronts is the setting for this harrowing account of two women committed to nursing the wounded on the front lines. Jo is an Italian Irish Brooklynite, Kay a small-town girl from Pennsylvania. They meet and seal their sisterhood in nursing school over the first of many brutal encounters that each endures.
Kay spends most of the war serving in a Japanese POW camp in Manila. Jo gets trapped in a freezing tent near the front lines with six wounded soldiers who cannot be moved and who have only her keeping them from death’s door. Both women live in both their fraught-with-danger present and their memories—of each other, better times, and past loves, like Kay’s romance with an airman before the events at Pearl Harbor, and Jo’s growing attraction to one of her patients. But time and conditions take their toll on both women—their health, their sprit, and their ability to carry on when peace finally comes.
The violent grit of wartime is relentless in The Fire by Night via both the narrative and the lucid and graphic writing style. Some readers might feel pushed beyond their own endurance by its intensity. But memory, healing, and friendship provide saving graces throughout this powerful debut novel.
