For Love and Country

Waters’s fast-paced and insightful debut follows the life-changing experiences of a woman serving in the Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After seeing a Navy ad in a movie newsreel for women volunteers, Lottie Palmer, a Detroit auto manufacturer heiress, abandons her fiancé on their wedding day, when “flowers were the one thing they weren’t rationing,” to join the Navy women’s reserve. Using skills she honed at her father’s factory, Lottie trains as a mechanic in San Diego, under the command of Capt. Luke Woodward, who “seemed to go out of his way to find something wrong with whatever she was doing.” Woodward is again Lottie’s commander when she is assigned to Pearl Harbor, undaunted by the surprise attack on the base a few years earlier. There, Luke reveals that he was hard on her so that no one would suspect his attraction to her, and Lottie realizes she is drawn to him as well. After Luke ships out aboard a carrier, having placed Lottie as second-in-command of their shop, she ably leads the men until hearing Luke is missing in action. Waters explores Lottie’s desire for self-determination through a convincing portrait of the era’s strict rules about social class and gender. Readers who can’t get enough of WWII fiction featuring strong women characters will definitely want to take a look. (Mar.)