#BookReview - Victory on the Home Front by Lilly Robbins Brock

Title:  Victory on the Home Front
Author:  Lilly Robbins Brock
Genre:  History, Military
Release Date:  January 15, 2018

About the Book:

Love, Marriage, Separation. A young couple’s marriage is interrupted by war. Their idyllic life is about to change. Will their love survive?

After Priscilla and Dean celebrated their first wedding anniversary in October 1941, the unimaginable happens. Pearl Harbor is attacked on December 7th. They know it’s only a matter of time before Dean is called to serve.

Victory on The Home Front is an insightful and heart-warming Memoir/Biography that shines a light on the women who contributed to the war effort during World War II.

This is a story about one of those women. Through historical research, several hours of interviews with Priscilla, her personal diary that had remained closed since 1940, and Dean’s letters from the war front, the author narrates Priscilla’s life story. Her story begins in a small lumber town where she falls in love and marries her high school sweetheart.

When the United States entered the Second World War, the couple put their marriage on hold to support their country. Each played an important role—Priscilla worked in a Boeing factory building planes as a Rosie the Riveter, and Dean joined the Navy to become a new kind of soldier--a fighting Seabee.

Buy Links: Amazon 

My Review:

Victory on the Home Front is more than just a historic novel.  It is more than a memoir.  It is more than a biography.  Victory on the Home Front is a personal account of what it was like to live as a young couple during the throws of World War II.  It is also a book that describes the turning point in the evolution of women in this country.  No longer are they the frail delicate flowers that must be protected by big strong men.  It was during this time that women realized their potential.  It was during this time that women realized their strength, emotionally and physically.

Lilly Robbins Brock, through her historic research and first-hand account with a real live "Rosie the Riviter", tells us the story of how women rolled up their sleeves, tied back their hair, and built airplanes at the Boeing plant... planes that helped us win WWII.  She takes us through the budding romance of a young couple, Priscilla and Dean Messinger, and how the war affected them both.  Dean went off to join the Navy as a fighting Seabee, and Priscilla went off to work building planes.

What the reader finds in this novel is so much more than you would find in a history book. The author quotes from actual letters written between Priscilla and Dean during the war, allowing the reader to feel what it was like to live through that time in U.S. history.  Not to get political here, but perhaps if our current generation could learn more about our "Greatest Generation", we could all be truly great again.

My Rating:

About the Author:

Lilly Robbins Brock and her husband live in a quiet country setting on the shores of the Columbia River in Cathlamet, Washington. She began her business as an interior designer in 1980, and has recently retired. Living in the country is the ideal environment for Lilly to pursue her lifelong desire to write. She also enjoys gardening, and realized her pioneer family’s planter blood is alive and well within her. 

Her book, Food Gift Recipes From Nature’s Bounty was inspired by the garden and orchard. Preserving the food evolved into the idea of sharing some of that food—the gift of food. 

Lilly loves history and one of her passions has been researching the genealogy of her family. She was born and raised in Olympia, Washington where her pioneer family homesteaded in the late 1800s. She has been working on a historical fiction novel, Intrepid Journey, about a family in the 1850s traveling on a paddle wheel steamship from New York to the rugged Pacific Northwest via the dangerous South American route. It’s a revealing glimpse into the past of what life was like at that time. 

Her book, Intrepid Journey, was put on hold when she discovered two letters written by her now deceased father while he was on the battlefront of World War II. The letters inspired her to find a World War II veteran still living and tell his story. She found her veteran and wrote Wooden Boats & Iron Men to honor him and all veterans. She recently finished her second book about another World War II veteran, Ever A Soldier. He turned one hundred years old in July 2017. Lilly feels that every veteran has a story, and at least she has been able to shine a light on these two extraordinary men. Now she is shining a light on the women who contributed to the war effort during World II, and has written about a Rosie the Riveter, now ninety-five years old, in her latest book, Victory on the Home Front.