100 Pages A Day...Stephanie's Book Reviews

It has been four years since Edie Blythe has seen her husband, Francis, alive.  He is officially missing, but presumed dead in the Great War.  When Edie receives a picture of Francis in the mail, she believes that he is out there somewhere, waiting to be found. Edie sends her brother-in-law, Harry on a mission to find Francis or his grave.  After the war, Harry has taken a job photographing graves or deceased service men for loved ones, now his brother is one more to add to the list.  As Harry returns to the war-ravaged landscape that he last knew as a soldier, the memories come flooding back and he struggles with the day that he left his brother for dead.  

The Poppy Wife is a journey of finding things that are lost and examining the state of the world post World War I.  I knew that many soldiers had been listed as missing after the War and that some were alive with no memory of life before; however, the impact that these missing men had on individual lives and whole town was immense.  The writing portrayed an air of melancholy wherever the characters went and seemed to carry a weight with them throughout the story.  While I expected the story to be about Edie's journey, it was mostly told through Harry's point of view and conveyed the psychological toll of surviving the War, revisiting the ravaged towns where he fought and finding closure.  Edie's journey was also about finding closure, but focused more on discovering just what her husband as well as the other men went through during the war.  The descriptions in the book took on the heavy task of describing a world torn apart and a people trying desperately to rebuild in the face of grief from many angles to accurately describe the overwhelming feeling post World War I.