The Victory Club
The Victory Club is the predictable story of four women on the American home front during World War II. Margo King has never gotten over her abandonment by the cad who got her pregnant out of wedlock. Her daughter, Dottie, follows the same path the night her high school sweetheart shipped out to Europe. Lucy Anderson, lonely and afraid, turns to another while her husband is away. Penelope Maxfield, resentful of her life as working mother and wife to a man unfit for active duty, eventually leaves to pursue her own happiness. The four women work together at Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho, where they struggle to keep their faith in Christ despite war and personal tragedy.
Hatcher has an armful of awards for her many previous novels, so this can’t be one of her best. I’ve enjoyed other inspirational fiction, but I found Hatcher’s assumption, in the character of Penelope and her husband, that a non-Christian would feel jealous of a Christian woman’s relationship with God more than a little annoying. Overall, The Victory Club seems an attempt to hammer a Christian message over the same old Mrs. Miniver plot.
