Book Review: Maureen Lee's After the War Is Over

My attraction to the lives of people who lived through World War II continues, as I quickly read through Maureen Lee's After The War is Over.

It is the second book of hers that I've read and she has stuck to the same time zone and type of characters as that other book of hers that I've read.

It's actually a telenovaela-esque type of novel about three women who were close friends in the UK army during World War II and it tells the story of their lives right after the war in 1945 until they become senior citizens in the early 1970s!

That's almost 35 years of three different life stories to digest!

It can be quite a tedious read because there are so many characters as the three women have big families and they also end up having families of their own.

I swear at one point, I did not bother anymore to carefully identify who was who. I just wanted to see the events unravel, especially for my favorite characters.

Just like in an expansive telenovela with so many characters, one would normally just concentrate on the few characters one really cares about.

I also said telenovela-esque because the plot has every event in any writer's bag of tricks - a rape, an unwanted pregnancy, a baby boy given to the best friend, women behaving like Madame Bovary, etc etc. This book could actually work well as a TV miniseries.

There's always something salacious happening at every turn of the page. However, this is not Anna Karenina and there are no philosophical musings of any kind.

It's more like being a voyeur in the lives of people when life meant no gadgets to immediately spread the bad news, and when indiscreet affairs were still considered public scandals.

The theme of friendship and the importance of one's family are the things that make the book interesting, especially for Filipinos who hold these two things close to our hearts.