DELIVERING APPLE PIE

A kaleidoscopic tale set around World War II with an international cast of characters.

In the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Claire Cartland’s family has fallen on hard times. With both parents gone, Claire and her sister, Amy, are left no choice but to leave the family homestead. While Amy dreams of acting, Claire enters nursing school, soon finding herself at a military field hospital in New Guinea after war breaks out in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Czech teenager Emma Gorzinski’s life is about to be torn apart by the Nazi occupation, and she’ll soon be subject to the unspeakable horrors of a concentration camp. Emma isn’t the only character overseas; readers next meet Sakura, a Japanese teenager who’s only beginning to contend with the horror that nations inflict upon one another in war. Then we’re back stateside with Ginny Cooper, a society girl at Northwestern University under pressure to find a suitable husband. We meet Larry Romano and Frank Wilson, a pair of hardscrabble Brooklyn boys who soon join the Navy and get wrapped up in the defining conflict of the 20th century. All of which is to say, intrigue and color abound in Reichert’s novel, but if your head is spinning from trying to keep each of the characters straight, you’ve also discovered the flaw at the center of this otherwise solid work. Still, this is well-researched fiction, and the scenes feel authentic, particularly Claire’s experiences at war: “[Nurses] can only leave quarters as a group, with an armed escort. This is supposedly for our safety but we all know it’s to keep the enlisted men off of us.”

A finely detailed war novel with an outsize cast.