This Is How I’d Love You: A Novel. Hazel Woods. Penguin Group (USA). August 2014.
320 pp. ISBN#: 9780142181485.
Hensley Dench has a “modern” relationship with her father
in pre-WWI America; they share intellectual ideas and Hensley is proud of his
anti-war writing for the New York Times. He’s also an avid chess player and begins a
correspondence with Charles Reid, an American medic, in which they briefly talk
about current politics and news, in each letter adding a single chess move to
their game played from afar.
Hensley meanwhile has developed her considerable sewing
skills and applied them to being accepted as a costume designer for a high
school drama club’s productions. The
director takes advantage of her naiveté and the consequences are devastating to
Hensley, compounded by the fact that her father is fired from his journalism
position when America enters the war.
He’s now a German-American pacifist who is forced to accept a managerial
position of a mine in New Mexico, and they are forced to move there in order to
survive. From the vibrant lively streets
of Manhattan, Hensley is hard put to find beauty in the stark, bleak New
Mexican desert-like atmosphere. She
finds partial friendship and conversation with a woman and her brother but it’s
a world strange to her metropolitan background, a world to which she opens to
perceive and react accordingly.
One small idea germinates into the pivotal point in this
novel. Hensley begins to add her own
lines in between her father’s lines in his letters to Charles Reid. This introduces a poetic, informative and
romantic phase into their lives, one direly awaited by Charles, who with his
friend are finding the brutality of this war almost unbearable. The notes back and forth between Charles and
Hensley are philosophical in many ways, fostered by pivotal questions arising
out of war and peace, ugliness and beauty, and more.
The rest of the novel concerns the choices arising from
the death of a loved one, the wounds crippling young men, the difficulties in
forging one’s way when numerous obstacles seem to mandate unhappy, resigned
choices, and an ultimate decision to unite when the barriers seem
insurmountable.
A microcosmic world constantly inundated by the effects
of WWI, Hensley and Charles Reid’s surroundings convey the power to totally
dehumanize or strengthen the essential connection to human ideas and love of
life. These dynamic characters slowly
but dramatically embrace the latter in a memorable story that celebrates the
human spirit’s ability to do more than survive the vicissitudes of war. This Is
How I Love You: A Novel is a celebration of those heroic steps that we
remember and honor. Beautiful, literate
historical fiction that this reviewer highly recommends!
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