After reading Becoming Lady Washington by Betty Bolté and reviewing it favorably on this blog here, I was inclined to accept a gift copy of her current novel, Notes of Love and War from publicist Wiley Saichek via Amazon. I don't want to be deluged with WWII novels. I know WWII is the most popular period for historical fiction, but reading about similar events repeatedly blunts the impact of a book. So I look for WWII novels with aspects that are unusual, or which are of particular interest to me. In the case of Notes of Love and War, it was the music aspect. I am fascinated by books centering on musicians or people who are part of the music world like Audrey Harper who was a music critic for a Baltimore newspaper during WWII. Both Audrey and the newspaper were fictional which gives historical fiction authors more freedom than when they are dealing with real historical personages. I wanted to see what happens when Betty Bolté has that freedom.
I was glad to see the feminist aspect of this book. During WWII many women were allowed to take jobs for which they normally wouldn't even be considered because the men who had filled those positions were fighting against Nazi Germany or Fascist Japan. Some of these women didn't consider these jobs as temporary. They expected to continue working after the war. Audrey was one of them. As far as she was concerned, she was "the real music critic". She had a college degree that qualified her, and connections in the local music world. Audrey was continually trying to convince her editor that she belonged in her job. I think that the means she used to discover a Nazi spy plot proved her knowledge of music. I was rooting for Audrey the entire time that I was reading Notes of Love and War.
The romance aspect involved internal conflict for Audrey. She knew she loved him, but he was assuming that she wanted to be a housewife. Since Bolté made it obvious to readers that she wanted to continue working in her profession, I didn't want to see her give it up. For me, finding out whether Audrey's romance would work out well for her was as suspenseful as the espionage.
I was interested to learn from the Author's Note that the spying incident was loosely based on an actual event. I think I found it online, but I don't want to link to it because the commonalities between what happened in history and what happened in the novel would be spoilers. Bolté created fictional spies and developed a fictional plan for them. I want readers to discover for themselves how Audrey sought to stop them and how it all resolved.
Notes of Love and War was a well-written historical novel that I would recommend to those who want to see a feminist perspective on a woman's life showing the balancing act of career, family and marriage during WWII in addition to an exciting spy plot.
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