SING, SING, SING!

Serendipitous encounters bring five restless young adults together in Texas, all of them heading west for new beginnings in this novel from Mack.

In April of 1943, with World War II still raging in Europe, New Yorker Tilda Morrison decides it is time for her to see something of the world outside her beloved hometown. The war brings prosperity to the city through stock market windfalls and jobs, but the fighting across the ocean is also wearing everyone down. Tilda’s two brothers and her brother-in-law are off fighting across one ocean or another, and her parents’ small apartment is starting to feel cramped. She heads into the train station with no specific plans or destination, just the desire for something different. Three months later, on a ranch in Pecos, Texas, Dusty Rhodes is loading up his mother’s station wagon: He, too, is leaving home. Dusty’s older brother Chet has been killed in the war. Chet was their father’s favorite, and he had been raised to take over operation of the family ranch, which now includes oil wells: This favorable development made the family more prosperous than they had ever expected. With Chet’s death, responsibility for ranch management falls to Dusty, who feels stifled under his father’s unforgiving thumb. He eventually decides it’s time to leave for California and find his own way of making a difference in the world. Along the way, he stops for a hitchhiker, one Jack Scoggins from Arkansas, whose dream is to join the Navy. But first, he wants to see America, so he has been hitching his way westward to San Diego, where he plans to sign up at the city’s naval recruiting center. In a diner on the outskirts of Houston, they meet Tilda, who is waitressing alongside Lucy Rivers. When Dusty invites Tilda to join them on their ride to California, Lucy is the first to jump with excitement at the idea. But the eclectic group is not yet complete. It is in Dallas that they meet Julia Stafford, a Texas native who has recently received an honorable discharge from the Navy. Lucy convinces her to join up with their westward-bound cadre.

Mack paints a well-observed portrait of Americana, as the narrative ambles through the final two years of the war. The five diverse protagonists’ unique backgrounds, personalities, and secrets that unspool gradually keep things interesting. Although poignant melodrama is kept to a minimum, an assortment of secondary characters who have their own tales to tell add engaging intrigue. Mack packs the narrative with an abundance of interesting tidbits about the everyday challenges imposed by the pervasive war rationing of food and gas (e.g., the national speed limit being 35 mph to save fuel). Tilda, who once worked in the H&H automat, secures a job in a movie studio commissary, introducing a glamour and an unconventional romance into the storyline. However, although the novel is entertaining, it abruptly ends rather than concludes, with several threads left dangling.

An absorbing character-driven narrative that gives a little-seen Stateside view of the WWII years.