Customer Reviews

Lizzie's War: A Novel (Plus)

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Tim Farrington is a wonderul writer who understands life so very well--his women, men, and children are so real and so heartbreakingly like our own that we can't help but embrace them too.

Lizzie's War is, at its core, a love story. Lizzie's love for her husband, so great that she still loves him in spite of her anger over his refusal to come home from the battlefield until his tour was over. Her love for her children, both alive and in utero, even though she did not want to become pregnant again. Most vitally, Lizzie learns to love herself after she's rediscovered the essence of her soul: this unearthed only after profound sadness and solitude.

Farrington lightly skips away from the politics of the US war in Vietnam. He really is writing this novel about a remarkable woman's re-discovering herself after emerging from the refiner's fire. His prose is just wonderful and thoughtful and poignant--if only there were more literary gems like Farrington out there! Another topic Farrington treats with respect is the role of organized religion, specifically Catholicism, in an unfair world. It plays a role in Lizzie's tragedy and triumph, though much more sublime than one would first suppose.

What a wonderful read this was! Sit down with this and enjoy a beautiful story of love, discovery, and a family's redemption despite the horrors of a faraway war.

Lizzie O'Reilly has to valiantly struggle with being the dutiful officer's wife and mother to their three kids while her husband serves his tour of duty in the Vietnam War. Chapters alternate between Lizzie in the States and Michael in Vietnam. Husband and wife, on separate continents have to deal with life's harsh issues; loss, grief, discrimination, desperation, and tragedy. Their kids grow up all too quickly. Horrified at the thought, Lizzie begrudgingly accepts the fact that the Marines will always play a role in their family's life. Each chapter is an eloquent but hard statement on how a war impacts a family. Each chapter is filled with emotion; notably when their fourth child is born. Their stories combine to create an amazing, well written love story that struggles to survive the dark days of war.

As usual, I think the author has excellent insight into human nature. Part of what I think makes him a good writer is the small things the characters do or think that make them seem so real--e.g. usually she used saccharin, but somehow Mike getting blown up made using real sugar seem more appropriate. I mean, when something serious happens we do have thoughts and behaviors like suddenly something like sticking to a diet seems too trivial to be bothered with any more, right?

My only complaint about this book is that after doing such a good job showing us what it's like for both halves of the relationship while one is off to war, and mentions the physical aftermath, there's no mention of the emotional aftermath--i.e. Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder. Considering the number of Vietnam vets for whom this was (& still is?) an issue--homeless vets, vets who are still constantly in & out of vet hospitals dealing wtih it--I think it might have been more realistic to have at least brought it up in someone else, even if he still wanted his romance between the main characters to have a happy ending.

This is the new book by Tim Farrington, who wrote a book I really loved, "The Monk Downstairs". I liked this new book, just not quite as much as his other.

"Lizzie's War" is the story of Lizzie and Michael O'Reilly and takes place in 1968-69, during the Viet Nam War. He is a Marine officer who is in VN and she is at home in VA with three children, expecting a fourth. The story alternates between her life and his, and is an interesting juxtaposition. I think that Farrington does outstanding character development and did a great job of describing a family that truly is living on the edge.

While I wanted to kick Michael for re-enlisting when he had family obligations, at the same time, the author made me understand his reasons. I admired Lizzie, because although sometimes she was "down" (who wouldn't be, in her situation?), she was not a whiner.

Well worth reading.

Tim Farrington's new novel Lizzie's War is all about the emotional and physical scars of war, both in the heat of battle and also on the domestic home front. Beginning with the Detroit riots in the summer of 1967 and ending on Labor Day weekend, 1968, the novel covers a tumultuous time in American history where society was undergoing profound change. The story tells of the sacrifices of an ordinary family when their unbridled, loyal, and thoroughgoing Marine father is shipped off to fight in Vietnam. Switching backwards and forwards between the front lines of war and the steadfastness of home, Farrington weaves a narrative of longing and desire. Liz and Mike O'Reilly must cope knowing that there's a possibility they may never see each other again.

Using measured, eloquent and absolutely masterful prose, the author reaches into the hearts of both Liz and Mike, and exposes the complicated reactions to a family that is constantly living on the edge, and where tragedy can randomly strike at any given moment. Both live with loneliness and doubt and with the discomfort and exhaustion of battlefield death and life without one's spouse. Mike faces the violence of a horrifically misguided war, whilst Liz must cope with her own suffering as she attends to the needs of her four children, with one on the way, waiting anxiously for Mike to return.

The story is told from the point of view of Liz, Mike, and Father Ezekiel Germaine, a war veteran and eccentric Parish priest who tends to Liz's emotional and spiritual needs whilst Mike is fighting. Liz has been left to contend with her own desires and yearnings. She tries to keep the home fires burning and take good care her children, but she also longs to pick up the theatre career she has abandoned for the demands of motherhood. Liz is a complex, intelligent, and talented woman, who is not only bound by the contradictions of her Catholic faith, but has been forced to put her life on hold for her "husband, for God, and for her country."

Liz can handle living with the possibility of Mike's death minute by minute, she can also handle the empty bed, but what she misses is the reality of the depth of their shared life. She's made tenuous peace with the war, with the idiocy of her husband shipping off to protect God and family at the expense of actual wife and kids, and also with the wreckage of her own dreams of getting back into theatre. But Liz is gradually becoming tired of it all - tired of having to justify the indefensible ways of men to children, tired of being a military mother, tired of trying to translate the world's madness and her country's and her husband's into something her son's and daughters could salute.

Captain Mike O'Reilly seems to have been born a Marine; he's "a warrior and a believer" through and through. And his remarkably literate and erudite letters back to Liz from the front lines suggest that he's having a kind of love affair with the theatre of war. Liz knows "he would go back into battle while there were battles to be fought" but she loves him regardless. The energy of conflict seems to invigorate Mike until one day he is badly wounded while helping to defend his infantry company.

When Mike hears of Liz's own troubles with their unborn child, Mike is forced to resolve his need for battle with the requirements and responsibilities of family and marriage. Mike has no illusions about the glamour and glory of war; he is a man who understands the meaning of fighting for his country and has made his peace with it for better and for worse. And Liz has come to terms with this side of Mike; she loves the fierceness of her husband's integrity "and his strange easy willingness to die for the right thing."

And then of course there's Father Germaine - a wounded Vietnam veteran and a conflicted character who questions what he'd believes he knows of God and life and service, of meaning and of truth. Germaine wants to be with Liz in her suffering, to suffer with her as helpless in it as she is. And also to keep vigil, and to "wait with her for the glimmer of God."

From the stink of the troops in the field to the nuances of everyday domestic existence, Farrington weaves a terribly emotional and poetic story of family life and spousal love. This is a family in crisis who must learn to adapt and make peace with a war that is steadily being discredited. Lizzie's War is astounding in its portrayal of the bloody chaos of war as well as the dark humor of a soldier navigating the trenches. But the novel is also a wonderful account of the clash between a mother's everyday duties and her unspoken, implicit and silent desires. Mike Leonard May 05.

A family is an amalgam of individuals as much as it is a collective entity.

In this novel, against the backdrop of military service life in the Vietnam war era, Farrington explores the impacts of active military service on a family and its individual members. Does Mike make the 'right' choices? Does Lizzie? You decide.

This book left me dissatisfied. Not with the writing, but with the reality of life during this era.

Beautifully written: Tim Farrington's characters come alive on the page.

Highly recommended - but be prepared to be uncomfortable.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I really liked this book. I was a bit apprehensive since it's about the Vietnam war, but it's worth it to get into Farrington's characters. His big strength is relationships and the related emotions. And I loved the priest. These people are real and imperfect. I thought the ending was a bit abrupt, sort of like it was too long and they had to cut it off somewhere. I was wondering what happened to the priest and other stuff, but that's fairly minor.

Another thing I love about Farrington is that his descriptions of nature and physical surroundings are beautiful and simple. He obviously has the chops to get a little more fancy but he chooses to keep within the story. A lot of times while reading a novel, I'll be scanning over the physical descriptions, waiting to get back to the relationship stuff, but with Farrington it all flows together seamlessly. He's now one of my favorite authors. And if you haven't read "The Monk Downstairs," that book rules too!

I have just finished re-reading this book and am again touched by the detail Farrington uses as he tells this story of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances.

This is a love story, but one with lots of roadblocks, the most obvious one being the Vietnam War. The main character, Lizzie, is depicted as strong, wise, and kind. As a soldier's wife during a morally ambiguous war, Lizzie faces parenting four children, an unexpected pregnancy, domestic drudgery, racism, and loneliness, all with compassion and gentle determination.

Mike, her husband, spends a good part of the story in Vietnam. The combat scenes are vivid and moving and somehow manage to incorporate small glimmers of kindness into the horrific descriptions of battle.

The characters are sympathetic, but just prickly enough to feel real. There is a lovely underlying current of spirituality in this book as well, not in a pushy or evangelical sense, just in that the reader is quietly reminded that grace always finds a place, even in the darkest moments.

A beautiful book.

Tim Farrington writes about unsurmountable obligations that intertwines with duty, be it with the military or the family, which are the core of his book, LIZZIE'S WAR. The story takes place during the height of the Vietnam War between 1967-1968, and is a somewhat autobiographical account of Farrington's childhood experience at the time, especially the setting of the home-front passages that depict Elizabeth O'Reilly's life managing four children in a military town, Virginia Beach, while her husband, Mike, fights in the jungles of Vietnam. Despite the demands that Liz and Mike are expected to uphold, their strong devout Catholic beliefs keep their lives from falling apart.

LIZZIE'S WAR may touch a nerve for those who can relate to Liz's and Mike's experience. Farrington vividly captures the social landscape of one of the most tense periods in American history. But for this story, homecomings do exist.