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In 1940, Iris James is the postmistress in coastal Franklin, Massachusetts. Iris knows more about the townspeople than she will ever say, and believes her job is to deliver secrets. Yet one day she does the unthinkable: slips a letter into her pocket, reads it, and doesn't deliver it.
Meanwhile, Frankie Bard broadcasts from overseas with Edward R. Murrow. Her dispatches beg listeners to pay heed as the Nazis bomb London nightly. Most of the townspeople of Franklin think the war can't touch them. But both Iris and Frankie know better...
The Postmistress is a tale of two worlds-one shattered by violence, the other willfully naïve-and of two women whose job is to deliver the news, yet who find themselves unable to do so. Through their eyes, and the eyes of everyday people caught in history's tide, it examines how stories are told, and how the fact of war is borne even through everyday life.
- Sales Rank: #140336 in Books
- Brand: PENGUIN GROUP (USA)
- Published on: 2011-02-01
- Released on: 2011-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.02" w x 5.05" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 371 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Kathryn Stockett Interviews Sarah Blake
Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. The Help is her first novel. Here she talks with novelist Sarah Blake about her experiences writing The Postmistress.
Kathryn Stockett: I should start by saying that I am honored to be on the same page with you—I loved The Postmistress. The book is so complex, it gives you so much to think about and discuss. My first question to you is, how did the book come about? What made you start writing it?
Sarah Blake: Thanks so much, Kathryn—and I'd like to lob those kind words right back at you; it's a tremendous thrill for me to be in conversation with the author of The Help.
The Postmistress began with a picture that sprang into my head one day, of a woman sorting the mail in the back of a post office, quietly slipping a letter into her pocket instead of delivering it. Immediately, questions flooded forward: Whose letter was it? Why on earth would she choose to pocket it? What havoc would be wreaked by not delivering a letter? As I answered those questions, Emma and Will and their love story, and the workings of the small town in which Iris was the center, came to life. One hundred pages into that draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus, out of the blue. I had no idea who she was or why she was there, except that one character referred to her as a war correspondent without a war. That was interesting, I thought. By this time I had decided to set the novel in the late thirties, early forties. It was 2001 and I was living in Washington, D.C., after the attacks of 9/11, and I was very preoccupied with trying to make sense of what was happening around me. Were we in danger? Would we go to war? The parallels between that uncertain time and the time before the United States entered World War II resonated with me, and what was a novel about accident and fate and the overlapping of lives deepened into a novel with war as its backdrop, which asked questions about how we understand ourselves to be in a historical moment and what we do when we are called to it.
Kathryn Stockett: Your book features three different women. From a logistical standpoint, did you find it hard to pull off the different points of view? I know this is something I spend a lot of time on in my work—making sure the voices are distinct and also very much true to the different characters.
Sarah Blake: To be honest, with this novel, the challenge was trying to keep each of these women in line, since each one threatened at some point or another to run away with the story! It took eight years for this story to become the novel you have in your hands, and in large part that's because with the introduction of each character, I found myself going off and following an individual story, traveling further and further from a workable plot. By the time I had finished, I had written three separate novels, one for each of the three women—complete with love affairs, whole families, other towns—and the challenge came not in trying to keep them distinct, but in trying to figure out how to weave their stories together.
Kathryn Stockett: Who is your favorite character, and why?
Sarah Blake: I'm not sure I can answer that, since there are parts of each of these women I admire, and parts of each of them I don't like. They are all broken in an essential way—a way I find incredibly interesting. When a reporter finds she cannot tell a story and a postmaster finds herself unable to pass along a letter, the moments they have arrived at as characters are compelling. Mrs. Cripps was certainly the most fun to write—she didn’t have to carry too much weight in the telling of the story, and she was such a nosy parker it was fun to write her lines.
Kathryn Stockett: Is there a character in The Postmistress with whom you identify most? (And if you have been having trysts with good-looking soldiers in dark alleyways, please share!)
Sarah Blake: Oh, there are bits of me in all three women: certainly Frankie's rage and sorrow, the desire to get the story (something I despaired of often in the eight years of writing); Iris's love of order; and Emma's feeling of invisibility, her longing for the sense that someone would watch over her.
Kathryn Stockett: The most haunting scenes for me—and there were many—were those of Frankie on the train with Thomas and of the mother and child on the train platform. How did these scenes come about? Were they difficult to write?
Sarah Blake: Much of the drive to write the book had to do with my own attempt to write my way toward understanding the sudden, final breaks that crack into our lives, in the form of accidents, death, other irrevocable events. I have two sons, and while it is impossible for me to imagine putting them on a train by themselves, with nothing but paper to send them to safety, it was easy to conjure feelings of despair and heartbreak. The book is full of mothers and sons being torn apart by childbirth, bombs, and visas; but the last parting—the mother embracing her boy in the train car with Frankie—was probably the most difficult to write. It's the hardest to comprehend, and yet it happened all the time, saying good-bye, knowingly, possibly forever.
Kathryn Stockett: What research did you do for historical accuracy? You seem to have really nailed the time period.
Sarah Blake: Thank you. I'm glad it feels credible. I read many books on the history of World War II, pored through Life magazines from 1939 to 1945 for a sense of how much things cost and what they looked like, read Federal Writers Project interviews with all types of people living on Cape Cod in the 1930s, watched movies made in 1940 and 1941 (my favorite is The Letter with Bette Davis) in order to get the rhythms of idiomatic speech. I also spent many hours at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and at the Radio & Television Museum in Bowie, Maryland.
(Photo of Kathryn Stockett © Kem Lee)
From Publishers Weekly
Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husband—a volunteer doctor stationed in England—James comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worlds—a naïve nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terror—with a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
In her latest novel, Blake gives a striking account of America on the verge of war and Europe in the midst of it and describes the horrors of Nazi Germany and the claustrophobia of small-town, mid-century America with equal aplomb. Despite some implausible plot developments, Blake maintains the story's credibility with powerful writing and a skillful manipulation of readers' sensibilities. Although critics cited an awkward beginning, some expository excesses, and a tendency to overdramatize, they all agreed that the novel truly soars during Frankie's perilous journey across Europe. The Christian Science Monitor expressed concerns that the novel will be lost in the glut of recent World War II fiction, but overall, The Postmistress is a moving page-turner from a talented writer.
Most helpful customer reviews
450 of 478 people found the following review helpful.
4.5 Stars: Telling a story through edges: the voice of WWII and women's lives
By D. Merrimon Crawford
In 1940, the lives of three women could not be more different as war rages in Europe. Iris James, postmistress of Franklin, Massachusetts, believes in order and details. She takes great pride in her work. All communications in the town come through her. The whole system works because of the neat efficient system and the trust. She keeps all the secrets of the residents, but one day, she breaks with everything she has ever believed, slipping a letter into her pocket. Emma Trask, wife of the town's doctor Will Fitch, listens to all the radio broadcasts from London with her husband. When a tragedy provokes a change in her husband and a determination to go over to Europe, Emma guards herself against the tides of war raging across a distant ocean. In London, Frankie Bard, works with Edward R. Murrow. Frankie listens to Murrow's story advice, yet her spirit chafes against the all the strictures and protocol imposed on her. Feisty, fearless and somewhat brash, she wants to get out the truth and stir her listeners to action. In 1941, Frankie rides the trains out of Germany, reporting on the war, listening to the voices of the so-called refugees. As she sees the war unfolding from a different perspective, her whole idea about the story itself changes.
In THE POSTMISTRESS, Sarah Blake looks at World War II through the eyes of three distinct women all connected through means of private and public media. In many ways, THE POSTMISTRESS itself follows Frankie's conception of a news story as story and herein lies the beauty of the novel. Sarah Blake's novel does not follow the traditional concepts of a novel. THE POSTMISTRESS tells the story of World War II through the edges, in the lives of the three women and the events of their lives, often events that even seem unrelated to the larger scene playing out in the world. Indeed, the emotional impact of the story builds as Frankie stops trying to tell the truth of the war and listens to the voices of those around her. The "truth" of the war often emerges in the edges, in those stories told and unspoken by the press and even the characters to some extent. Although Sarah Blake draws on the history and historical figures of the times, THE POSTMISTRESS is not a historical novel filled with date and details from the history books. The reader will not find all the horrific details of the Holocaust or the London Blitz and yet, in telling the story through the edges of war scene, THE POSTMISTRESS allows the reader's imagination to enter the story. With the copious amount of World War II history and fiction published, readers undoubtedly are more than familiar with the main story of the War, and yet, THE POSTMISTRESS brings a freshness to the story. For this reader, THE POSTMISTRESS, is one of the first to tell the story of the trains from a viewpoint that truly engages imagination and emotion in both the details of individuals, sometimes even the characters for whom only a name and place is known, who might have experienced the events. Like Frankie's approach to the story, less is sometimes more. Equally, the conflicts and struggles of Emma Fitch and Iris James bring a whole other emotional dimension and texture to the story.
THE POSTMISTRESS is a wonderful blend of popular women's fiction and literary fiction. The novel gains more emotional power and intellectual interest as it progresses. The first part reads more like light women's fiction as the author introduces the three women whose lives will touch one another's. Frankie's development, however, guides the heart of the story, developing the lens through which the richness of the other characters emerges. The beginning of the story actually gains more relevance and emotional depth in hindsight, as Frankie's less traditional concept of a news story begins to cast the novel itself within a different framework. THE POSTMISTRESS is a story of women's lives, of life, death and love during WWII, and by end, a story about the art of storytelling itself.
379 of 413 people found the following review helpful.
Review of The Postmistress
By Lydia
Honestly - I wanted to love this book. I wanted to fall down in adoration and sing its praises and recommend it to everyone I know. I mean - look at it. The cover is beautiful. The title catching, simple, perfect. The premise a beautiful one, the story of two women who were unable to simply.. do their job, in a time when doing their job was one of the hardest things they could possibly do.
So on one hand, while there were moments I was extremely touched (mostly during speeches made and newscasts made), I felt as if Blake stopped just short of really getting somewhere with the character. I felt anger and frustration because I wanted to know these characters. I wanted to know Emma and Iris and Frankie. I wanted to know what made them tick. I wanted to know what made Iris do that incredibly crazy thing at the start and why Frankie felt so compelled to go to London to report the news. I wanted to know why Emma was separated from her husband for so long and how she handled the unexpected gift he left behind for her.
Instead I was left with a story that tried to tell too much in too short a time. Instead of focusing in and really delving into the characters we were only given a glimpse and that is why this book isn't getting the high praise I desperately wanted to give it. I have never felt so incredibly frustrated after reading a novel. There was so much potential here - so much that could have been told.
238 of 273 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing
By Daffy Du
With a setting during WWII and the fairly novel (for the time) idea of a female broadcast journalist at its core, "The Postmistress" seemed like a promising book. To be sure, the author has a way with words, crafting some lovely phrases and metaphors. But ultimately, they are not enough to offset a book that lacks heart, and as a consequence, it was a rather plodding read. Like another reviewer, I only finished it because I felt obligated to review it for the Vine program.
It's hard to figure how a story revolving around one of the seminal events of the 20th century, one that devastated millions of lives and continues to cast an ominous shadow nearly 70 years later, could be tedious, predictable and, at times, even trite, but that's what Sarah Blake has managed to write. The main characters--Frankie, the Smith alum journalist; Emma, the doctor's new wife; Iris, the spinster postmaster of the small Cape Cod town where half the book is set; Harry, the town mechanic and Iris's lover; and Will, the doctor who runs away to London to escape his past and aid victims of the Blitz--are not well enough drawn to elicit any emotional response from the reader (at least not this reader). We never really get to know them except in the most superficial way, and because of that, it's almost impossible to care about any of them. Instead, the author seemed so intent on tying together the rather improbable coincidences in the plot (would Will really run into Frankie in a London bomb shelter after her broadcasts inspired him to leave his wife and help with the British war effort?) that she lost sight of the fact that it is the characters who drive the plot forward. These folks all just seemed along for the ride.
The book also has identity problems. Although it clearly aspires to be literary fiction, it is more of a romance, with too much formula and too little substance, the author's attention to historical detail notwithstanding. I used to edit mass market paperbacks in a prior life, including genre fiction, and this had all too much in common with historical romances (aka bodice rippers) and Harlequin romances but with too little of any of the elements that attract the devotees of those genres. At other times, it seemed almost like reportage of the characters' lives, too removed from the events at hand and their effects on the characters to pull the reader in. Yet that reportage was largely impressionistic, in that there were various plot elements that were not resolved nicely. What was Frankie's trip from Bayonne back to Paris like? What was going through her mind when she crossed the Channel? Instead, we find her back in America en route to Franklin, with only passing references to how she got there. And then the last chapter or two were crammed with events, as if the author was finally bored and wanted to tie things up and move on.
Also disconcerting was the author's tendency to switch points of view from one character to the next with little or no warning. Not only is omniscient point of view difficult to pull off well, the constantly shifting perspective created confusion and contributed to the lack of connection with the characters.
The only time "The Postmistress" approached any kind of emotional depth was when Frankie was recording the details of the refugees' lives, including the two that continued to haunt her. But those were too few and too far between, and Blake's repeated references to them came to detract from their power. The brief attention paid to Otto, the Austrian refugee living in Franklin, MA, also promised to finally infuse the book with an emotional dimension, but again it was too fleeting and cursory to fulfill its promise. How did he wind up in a small resort town on Cape Cod, rather than in one of the East Coast cities? Who was he in his previous life? What happened to him?
I also have an issue with the promotional copy for the book, which implies that a decision by the postmaster/mistress not to deliver a letter was a pivotal event. Instead it came about 3/4 of the way through the book and while it tugged at Iris's conscience briefly, it in no way advanced the plot, nor did it reveal anything about the character. It's probably reflective of the book's myriad problems that the editor had to seize on something so late in the story and so inconsequential to try to sell the book.
I actually think Sarah Blake has a lot of promise as a writer, and the idea behind "The Postmistress" was interesting, but she has a lot of seasoning ahead of her before she will realize that potential. I'd suggest giving this one a miss and seeing what she comes up with later in her career.
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