EFR REVIEWS

LETTERS FROM SKYE A sweeping story told in letters, spanning two continents and two world wars, Jessica Brockmole’s atmospheric debut novel captures the indelible ways that people fall in love, and celebrates the power of the written word to stir the heart.   March 1912: Twenty-four-year-old Elspeth Dunn, a published poet, has never seen the world beyond her home on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. So she is astonished when her first fan letter arrives, from a college student, David Graham, in far-away America. As the two strike up a correspondence—sharing their favorite books, wildest hopes, and deepest secrets—their exchanges blossom into friendship, and eventually into love. But as World War I engulfs Europe and David volunteers as an ambulance driver on the Western front, Elspeth can only wait for him on Skye, hoping he’ll survive.   June 1940: At the start of World War II, Elspeth’s daughter, Margaret, has fallen for a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Her mother warns h...

THE WAR PRAYER  Written by Mark Twain during the Philippine-American War in the first decade of the twentieth century, The War Prayer tells of a patriotic church service held to send the town's young men off to war. During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory are double-edged-by praying for victory they are also praying for the destruction of the enemy... for the destruction of human life. Originally rejected for publication in 1905 as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine," this antiwar parable remained unpublished until 1923, when Twain's literary executor collected it in the volume Europe and Elsewhere. Handsomely illustrated by the artist and war correspondent John Groth, The War Prayer remains a relevant classic by an American icon. ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Set during the Phillipine-American War, The War Prayer is a brief fable, presented in a poem-like form,...

THE BEGUILED Wounded and near death, a young Union Army corporal is found in the woods of Virginia during the height of the Civil War and brought to the nearby Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Almost immediately he sets about beguiling the three women and five teenage girls stranded in this outpost of Southern gentility, eliciting their love and fear, pity and infatuation, and pitting them against one another in a bid for his freedom. But as the women are revealed for what they really are, a sense of ominous foreboding closes in on the soldier, and the question becomes: Just who is the beguiled? ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ Union Army Corporal John Patrick McBurney, 20, is found wounded / near dead in the Virginia woods by thirteen year old Amelia Dabney while she's out mushroom hunting. Amelia decides to take John back to her nearby boarding school, the Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Regarding the history of the school, the story goes that Farnsworth E...

Gone With The Wind. That is one beautifully shot movie.  I've seen it dozens of times. The movie actually made me really curious about the original book, and then while reading the book I was also reading a bio on Margaret Mitchell  --- between these two books and the movie, I came across so much good stuff I wanted to hash over! I'm sure, given the iconic rep this book has, that I'm probably going to upset the mass majority here, but truthfully now ... I wasn't overly blown away by this book. There. I said it, hate mail be damned. I did not fall madly in love with Mitchell's opus here. But hear me out -- that's not to say that I failed to find anything good in this massive book, there were elements I really liked. I just ended up feeling like the book could have used some serious editing {btw, after reading the Mitchell bio, I found out that the book DID go through massive edits but sorry, to me it felt like some parts in there could have sti...