The Liberty Scarf
Here’s a novel like a silk scarf—light, attractive, shape-shifting.
The Liberty Scarf weaves together three romantic stories set during World War I. It’s the work of three collaborating authors, and each story centers around a young woman: a British textile designer, a French-Canadian telephone operator, and a Belgian nurse. Their lives are linked by a beautiful scarf produced by the glamorous Liberty of London. Scarves serve various purposes in the novel, both practical and decorative, and they also symbolize love, joy, strength, creativity, and healing. Ultimately the three plots tie up together in a satisfying, if bittersweet, fairytale ending.
Each subplot is also a wartime love story: artistic Iris meets Rex, a charming disabled officer; prickly, defensive Geneviève encounters Maxime, a dashing pilot; and Clara, a born storyteller, nurses Roman, a violinist, back to health. Each young man risks his life in some branch of the military, while each young woman also contributes. Meanwhile the Liberty scarf passes dramatically from one person to another, changing all six lives.
The novel is a workmanlike book that moves smoothly from story to story and incorporates many colorful bits of World War I history (and the occasional anachronism: there were no Jeeps till 1940). Sometimes the various plot twists are telegraphed well ahead of time, and the text displays some distracting writing habits, particularly in diction. There is also one truly perplexing simile: a cup of coffee is “as precious as a grenade with a pulled pin.”
But altogether the scarf is an intriguing literary concept, and The Liberty Scarf is a pleasant, romantic addition to a shelf of World War I fiction.
