The Breaking Wave

** spoiler alert ** What a heartbreaking book this is. (NOTE: SPOILERY REVIEW) It starts at the end of what happens, so you know how it comes out. Then it goes back and tells you what happened to make things come out that way. Janet Prentice was a WREN in England in WW2, and she was a good one. She worked on guns for ships, and she could hold her own with the men she worked with. She could even shoot guns, though that wasn't her job. But sometimes needs must, and it was her shooting down a plane that changed her life. After her lover Bill was killed in the war, Janet was at loose ends. She had several tragedies follow, and she became convinced she was in some way responsible for those tragedies because of the shooting. All that finally breaks her, and she's out of the WRENs, and out of the one job where she felt she really belonged. She spent years trying to get back, but couldn't. I thought of that Robert E. Lee quotation while reading this book: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." War gave her life meaning. She found some solace looking after others (her mother, an aunt, and finally the mother and father of her lover), but in the end she felt that she was in a corner with no way out. And that's what so heartbreaking. Her lover Bill's brother, Alan, had only met her once, but never forgot her. He searched for her for years, on and off, hoping to bring her into HIS life. And he missed her by one day. I really quite like Nevil Shute stories. This one was narrated by Patrick Tull. Mr. Tull has a... unique narrative style. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't. I liked most of it in this book. He conveyed who was speaking by fairly subtle accent shifts. There's some language of the time here, like the implication that women who don't have families are in an "unnatural" state and that that's what makes them unhappy. But Shute's characters are well-formed and interesting. 4 stars instead of 5 because I felt the very end was a bit of a cop-out after all that had gone before. But it's a good story. Scribd has a number of his books on audio, and I'm looking forward to listening to more. I'm working my way up to listening to On The Beach. I've been scared of it since I was a girl.