THE HOME FRONT

When a prisoner-of-war camp is set up outside a Wisconsin town, a young woman whose husband is in the Army must manage the family farm and deal with the temptation of a new romance.

Hanneken’s debut novel pivots around an intriguing and little discussed piece of World War II history. As the Allies finally began racking up victories, they found themselves responsible for an unwieldy number of prisoners of war. Winston Churchill prevailed on President Franklin D. Roosevelt to set up POW camps in the United States. It is on a farm near one such camp that readers find 25-year-old Maggie Wentworth. She has just awakened after another night of physical abuse at the hands of her drunken husband, Erik. Following a dispute with his brother, Erik had to move his family to Maggie’s parents’ farm. The arrangement has left Erik embittered and increasingly violent. Things go from bad to worse when Erik enlists in the Army. Maggie; her father, Big Jack Mueller; and her 4-year-old-son, Benny, are left to handle the farm on their own. Fortunately, Maggie applies to the government’s Manpower Commission, established to supply farms with migrant workers to replace the men at war. And here she strikes gold. She has been accepted for both the program that supplies Black workers (in this case from Jamaica) and the one that provides German POW laborers. Among the Germans who show up at the farm is the handsome and pleasantly mischievous Adam Klein. A variety of tensions keeps the engrossing narrative moving—local and POW racist hostility toward the Jamaicans, ambivalent feelings about the POWs in a town that is heavily populated with Germans who immigrated in the decades before the war, and Maggie’s feelings of guilt over being a married woman falling for a German soldier while her husband is fighting in Europe. Despite a Hallmark Channel–style gloss that coats Hanneken’s portrait of small-town life, farming, and relationships, the story remains enjoyable, with easy-flowing dialogue. Especially tender is the friendship that develops between Maggie and Oku Manley, the leader of the Jamaican crew.

An engaging homefront tale with a likable female lead and a few surprises.