The Reluctant Canary Sings
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Bobbi Bowen lives in Cleveland. It’s 1937 in the second dip of a double-dip depression. When she leaves the apartment, she passes the Holy Rosary soup kitchen, with its straggle of shuffling men and women in their bedraggled coats. Most days she hums the new swing tunes—Cream Puff or Sing, Sing, Sing— because it seems every time she turns the radio on, she hears about another dismembered body left lying around town. At home, she ducks her parents’ fights—sometimes ducking a flying plate or saucer. So when the bank cuts her mother’s hours, she’s got one chance to keep a roof over her family’s heads—to turn her voice, her most private pleasure, into a public commodity. At the end of her sophomore year, she forever gives up her dream of art school to spend her nights singing in nightclubs. Even though she’s able to make enough to support her family, security remains an illusion she can’t seem to capture no matter how hard she tries. Is she making herself bait? Will her father’s betrayal destroy her?
Customer Reviews
Historical romance and overcoming trauma
I received an ARC for this book.
Connor, fresh from the Pacific, is finishing out his enlistment as an MP on the army base outside of Colorado Springs recovering from a bad case of malaria and trying to deal with his PTSD.
Bobbie, a WAC, has spent much of WWII repairing radios in planes and singing at a lounge in Colorado Springs in her off time.
The pair hit it off, after overcoming a few roadblocks and manage to fall in love, even though both of them have one foot out of the relationship: Connor and his uncertain mental situation after serving in the Pacific, and Bobbie with her desire to return to the road singing with big bands and her uncertainty of farm life. But they decided that they loved each other enough that blow ups and forgone dreams wouldn’t stand in their way of making a go of it.
The couple work hard to make a normal life for themselves in Nebraska but the fear of Connor’s blow ups intensify when Bobbie is put through a traumatic pregnancy and labor that they fear damaged their daughter.
The fear of hurting the baby more and the inability to be a good mother sends Bobbie running and Connor struggling to understand how exactly their life together fell apart.
Gravy is the final book in a trilogy, the first, The Reluctant Canary Sings, chronicles Bobbie’s life in Cleveland, OH as a big band singer during the Great Depression. The second, See Willie See, is about Connor’s time with the Army in Panama and the Pacific with flashbacks to his life on the farm in Nebraska and his time tramping around the American west during the Great Depression.
Faith’s extraordinary ability to fill her books full of historically accurate details without bogging down the story never fails to wow me. Her characters are multi-dimensional and interesting without ever feeling fake. Their actions are completely in-character and the reader fully understands why they’re doing what they’re doing without needing huge info-dumps to get there.
While the beginning is a little slow going to set up all of the back story and the story’s moving parts, Gravy quickly becomes a steamroller that you can’t stop reading. The need to know what happens next and the will-they-won’t-they will keep you turning pages long after you should have gone to bed.
I feel that the overarching theme of the book is trauma, how it can come from different places, and affect people differently. Also, how important communication with loved ones about it is in order to maintain relationships and understand how it aff