The Wartime Sisters

October 15, 2018
Estranged sisters seek connection and purpose at the Springfield Armory during the tumult of WWII in this novel of productive rivalries from Loigman (The Two-Family House). Ruth and Millie Kaplan have been at odds from the beginning. As children, they were labeled by their parents—and their tightly knit Jewish community in Brooklyn—as the brains and the beauty, respectively. Growing up, Ruth seethed as she felt obligated to fix her little sister’s mistakes. Meanwhile, Millie soaked in all the male attention, but also aspired to be more than just someone’s trophy wife. When unexpected tragedy breaks the family apart, Ruth leaves Brooklyn for Springfield, Mass., to stay with extended family, while Millie stays behind, gets married, and only rarely writes her sister. Years later, at the height of WWII, Millie and her young son shows up on Ruth’s doorstep, forcing to the surface their long-closeted frustrations. Together with a cast of motivated women from all classes of society, Ruth and Millie navigate old lies as well as newfound alliances and enemies within the Springfield Armory, where they all work to help the war effort. With measured, lucid prose, Loigman tells a moving story of women coming together in the face of difficulties, both personal and global, and doing anything to succeed.

November 15, 2018

Loigman's second novel (after The Two-Family House) follows Jewish sisters Ruth and Millie Kaplan from their childhood in Brooklyn to adulthood living at an armory base in Springfield, MA, during World War II. The elder by three years, Ruth is held to almost impossible standards, while Millie, with her striking looks and pleasing manner, gets away with almost anything. Possible suitors for Ruth always end up pursuing the younger, more beautiful Millie. After their parents die unexpectedly and Millie loses her husband, Lenny, the sisters end up together. Ruth's husband, Arthur, is an army officer, which allows Ruth to work a prestigious job in payroll, while Millie becomes a soldier of production in an armory factory. Resentment and jealousy intensify as Millie again becomes the beloved center of Ruth's social circle. Then a stranger arrives and long-buried secrets are revealed, leaving the sisters a chance at a hopeful future. Loigman provides a behind-the-scenes look, in alternating points of view, at women fighting their own wars at home. VERDICT Readers will enjoy the heartfelt picture of women's daily life during wartime through the eyes of two extraordinary sisters. Recommended for historical fiction fans of Pam Jenoff and Kate Morton.--Laura Jones, Argos Community Schs., IN

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2018
In a Massachusetts armory town, four women negotiate the World War II homefront.Loigman's second novel portrays a sampling of the women whose roles were pivotal during the wartime manufacturing boom. Lillian is the wife of Patrick, commanding officer of the Springfield Armory. Her family life is happy but always overshadowed by memories of childhood abuse by a cruel, martinet father. Arietta, an Italian-American from a vaudeville background, works as a cook in the local cafeteria, where she also belts out numbers to great acclaim. Millie, a war widow, works in the arms factory. She and her toddler son, Michael, live with her sister, Ruth, who works in payroll and is married to Arthur, a top armory scientist. The novel focuses primarily on Millie and Ruth, bracketing their particular sibling rivalry with the sisterhood of women at war. But Loigman's main preoccupation, conveyed with unsparing candor in extended flashbacks, is with the drastically disparate treatment, by their parents and everyone around them, of Ruth and Millie. In their 1930s Brooklyn Jewish household, youngest daughter Millie, with her red hair and blue eyes, is compared and judged superior to firstborn Ruth, whose appearance, though not described beyond "straight hair" and "brown eyes," does not measure up. The pattern continues as the girls mature: Ruth's academic achievements are discounted, her perfectionism is taken for granted, and her dates are diverted by her sister. Millie, however, seems directionless and confused. Her first serious boyfriend, future husband Lenny, is dubbed "the Bum" by her mother. So desperate is Ruth to escape the eternal comparisons that she marries Arthur and is overjoyed to be relocated to backwater Springfield. The parents' influence is so far-reaching and invasive that their sudden deaths in a car accident are a necessary authorial expedient to let the plot breathe. The stark, painful depiction of "looks-ism," 1930s style, undercuts the anodyne message of the novel's resolution.Though it highlights historic advances for women, this book is really about gender discrimination in the home.

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November 1, 2018
A lifetime of regret and resentment bubbles to the surface at a WWII armory in this tensely emotional novel. Although Ruth and Millie are sisters, the serious older sister, Ruth, seems to live in a world apart from the beautiful Millie, who is doted on by her parents and beseeched for dates by besotted neighborhood boys during their years growing up in Brooklyn. While Ruth marries and starts a family, Millie's handsome but ill-mannered boyfriend, Lenny, meets the full obstinate opposition of their mother, who harbors fantasies of a wealthy man whisking both mother and daughter away. The sisters drift apart, until Millie reveals that Lenny is gone, and she comes to stay with Ruth at the armory where her husband works. Under the stress of wartime and the watchful eyes of their fellow residents at the armory, secrets both sisters have kept threaten to break apart the fragile domestic harmony they have established. With a perceptive lens on the challenges of whittling away grievances that have built up over years, The Wartime Sisters is a powerful pressure cooker of a family drama.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)