This is not the first book I have read that centers on a main character who delivers the mail.  In the first one, Il Postino, the main character, Mario, has a job delivering the mail, but he only has one person on his route, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. famed for his love poems.  There are a few similarities between that Chilean novel by Antonio Skarmeta, and the recent one, The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake.    Both main characters have a strong sense of their responsibility to deliver the mail.  Both books are set in the mid 20th century against a backdrop of political unrest and/ or turmoil.   Both novels have a strong undercurrent of  quiet desperation only thinly veiled by surface normalcy.  The similarities end there.  

In Blake’s novel, the postmistress of Franklin Massachusetts, Iris James, feels that her job is to keep order by sorting and delivering the mail according to the rules of the postal service.  When her machine malfunctions and smudges the date on three letters, someone in the post office asks her, “One date or the next.  Does it really matter?” Iris responds, “Yes, it does matter.  It matters very much.”  When people entered the post office they were “met with a sense of calm born out of rigid adherence to an unwavering routine.”  Iris is bothered by “random inexplicable happenings.”  These random happenings frame the story of  Frankie Bard, a reporter who is in London during the blitz.  She is broadcasting  for Edwin R Murrow in an effort to make Americans understand what is happening as Germany bombs London night after night.  “Frankie was holding the curtain back so they (Americans) could hear it better. . ..  I dare you, she thought now, to look away.”  For Frankie, it is the story that matters.  When she is sent to France to interview refuges, she is confident that she can get the story and “turn the heads of her listeners.”  Iris observes the world from behind her postal window, and Frankie reports from the isolation of the broadcast booth.  As their stories unfold and and become intertwined, both women find their sense of order destroyed.

I enjoyed reading this book.  It was a little slow taking shape, but, for the most part,  the characters are fully drawn, making us care about them enough to keep reading.    I would point out the style seems a little wordy, but, since I seem to think that about several books I’ve read lately, I wonder if it is just my preference.  Also, in the back of the book, is a short section called The Story Behind the Story where Blake details how the idea and the plot developed as she collected and reordered her experiences into a whole.   I found it interesting to read how the germ of an idea grows into a novel. 

Steampunk revisited:

For those who are interested in this genre (see earlier post), check out this link that my brother sent:

http://systems.lib.clemson.edu/blog/2011/06/steampunk-fiction-donated/

I am going to put this one on my list to read;

I just finished reading a strange one.....The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb........did not like the first couple of chapters but plodded on as my sister had given me the book and was expecting a comment!  So glad I did; If you have not read it, it is based on the true events at Columbine...how one teacher was impacted who was caught in the library during the rampage (her character is fiction) book is fiction but includes a great many true facts and events woven throughout his story, which is powerful....really shows the impact of post traumatic stress disorder on folks of all kinds .... from Korean War, Civil War, etc. through Columbine and their families.......I think he builds the characters so well.....One of his minor characters is a female psychologist who is Indian and I can just "see her!"  it is gut wrenching in places but I am so glad I read it; I have a much better appreciation of those who are diagnosed with this malady and those who do "survive" stressful times....