The Postmistress [Audiobook] [Unabridged] (Audio CD) [Unknown Binding]

-Sarah Blake- (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2010

Unabridged CDs, 9 CDs, 11 hours Read by TBA What would happen if someone did the unthinkable-and didn't deliver a letter? Filled with stunning parallels to today, The Postmistress is a sweeping novel about the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women-and of two countries torn apart by war.

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• ASIN: B003I7LLJ6
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (257 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,389,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah Blake taught high school and college English for many years in Colorado and New York. She has taught fiction workshops at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA, The Writer's Center, in Bethesda MD, The University of Maryland, and The George Washington University. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, the poet Joshua Weiner, and their two sons.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

383 of 407 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4.5 Stars: Telling a story through edges: the voice of WWII and women's lives, November 30, 2009

By 

D. Merrimon Crawford (Colorado) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Postmistress (Hardcover)

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In 1940, the lives of three women could not be more different as war rages in Europe. Iris James, postmistress of Franklin, Massachusetts, believes in order and details. She takes great pride in her work. All communications in the town come through her. The whole system works because of the neat efficient system and the trust. She keeps all the secrets of the residents, but one day, she breaks with everything she has ever believed, slipping a letter into her pocket. Emma Trask, wife of the town's doctor Will Fitch, listens to all the radio broadcasts from London with her husband. When a tragedy provokes a change in her husband and a determination to go over to Europe, Emma guards herself against the tides of war raging across a distant ocean. In London, Frankie Bard, works with Edward R. Murrow. Frankie listens to Murrow's story advice, yet her spirit chafes against the all the strictures and protocol imposed on her. Feisty, fearless and somewhat brash, she wants to get out the truth and stir her listeners to action. In 1941, Frankie rides the trains out of Germany, reporting on the war, listening to the voices of the so-called refugees. As she sees the war unfolding from a different perspective, her whole idea about the story itself changes.

In THE POSTMISTRESS, Sarah Blake looks at World War II through the eyes of three distinct women all connected through means of private and public media. In many ways, THE POSTMISTRESS itself follows Frankie's conception of a news story as story and herein lies the beauty of the novel. Sarah Blake's novel does not follow the traditional concepts of a novel. THE POSTMISTRESS tells the story of World War II through the edges, in the lives of the three women and the events of their lives, often events that even seem unrelated to the larger scene playing out in the world. Indeed, the emotional impact of the story builds as Frankie stops trying to tell the truth of the war and listens to the voices of those around her. The "truth" of the war often emerges in the edges, in those stories told and unspoken by the press and even the characters to some extent. Although Sarah Blake draws on the history and historical figures of the times, THE POSTMISTRESS is not a historical novel filled with date and details from the history books. The reader will not find all the horrific details of the Holocaust or the London Blitz and yet, in telling the story through the edges of war scene, THE POSTMISTRESS allows the reader's imagination to enter the story. With the copious amount of World War II history and fiction published, readers undoubtedly are more than familiar with the main story of the War, and yet, THE POSTMISTRESS brings a freshness to the story. For this reader, THE POSTMISTRESS, is one of the first to tell the story of the trains from a viewpoint that truly engages imagination and emotion in both the details of individuals, sometimes even the characters for whom only a name and place is known, who might have experienced the events. Like Frankie's approach to the story, less is sometimes more. Equally, the conflicts and struggles of Emma Fitch and Iris James bring a whole other emotional dimension and texture to the story.

THE POSTMISTRESS is a wonderful blend of popular women's fiction and literary fiction. The novel gains more emotional power and intellectual interest as it progresses. The first part reads more like light women's fiction as the author introduces the three women whose lives will touch one another's. Frankie's development, however, guides the heart of the story, developing the lens through which the richness of the other characters emerges. The beginning of the story actually gains more relevance and emotional depth in hindsight, as Frankie's less traditional concept of a news story begins to cast the novel itself within a different framework. THE POSTMISTRESS is a story of women's lives, of life, death and love during WWII, and by end, a story about the art of storytelling itself.

298 of 323 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Review of The Postmistress, March 5, 2010

By 

Lydia "The Lost Entwife" (Illinois) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Postmistress (Hardcover)

Honestly - I wanted to love this book. I wanted to fall down in adoration and sing its praises and recommend it to everyone I know. I mean - look at it. The cover is beautiful. The title catching, simple, perfect. The premise a beautiful one, the story of two women who were unable to simply.. do their job, in a time when doing their job was one of the hardest things they could possibly do.

So on one hand, while there were moments I was extremely touched (mostly during speeches made and newscasts made), I felt as if Blake stopped just short of really getting somewhere with the character. I felt anger and frustration because I wanted to know these characters. I wanted to know Emma and Iris and Frankie. I wanted to know what made them tick. I wanted to know what made Iris do that incredibly crazy thing at the start and why Frankie felt so compelled to go to London to report the news. I wanted to know why Emma was separated from her husband for so long and how she handled the unexpected gift he left behind for her.

Instead I was left with a story that tried to tell too much in too short a time. Instead of focusing in and really delving into the characters we were only given a glimpse and that is why this book isn't getting the high praise I desperately wanted to give it. I have never felt so incredibly frustrated after reading a novel. There was so much potential here - so much that could have been told.

205 of 232 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, December 20, 2009

By 

Daffy Du (Del Mar, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Postmistress (Hardcover)

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With a setting during WWII and the fairly novel (for the time) idea of a female broadcast journalist at its core, "The Postmistress" seemed like a promising book. To be sure, the author has a way with words, crafting some lovely phrases and metaphors. But ultimately, they are not enough to offset a book that lacks heart, and as a consequence, it was a rather plodding read. Like another reviewer, I only finished it because I felt obligated to review it for the Vine program.

It's hard to figure how a story revolving around one of the seminal events of the 20th century, one that devastated millions of lives and continues to cast an ominous shadow nearly 70 years later, could be tedious, predictable and, at times, even trite, but that's what Sarah Blake has managed to write. The main characters--Frankie, the Smith alum journalist; Emma, the doctor's new wife; Iris, the spinster postmaster of the small Cape Cod town where half the book is set; Harry, the town mechanic and Iris's lover; and Will, the doctor who runs away to London to escape his past and aid victims of the Blitz--are not well enough drawn to elicit any emotional response from the reader (at least not this reader). We never really get to know them except in the most superficial way, and because of that, it's almost impossible to care about any of them. Instead, the author seemed so intent on tying together the rather improbable coincidences in the plot (would Will really run into Frankie in a London bomb shelter after her broadcasts inspired him to leave his wife and help with the British war effort?) that she lost sight of the fact that it is the characters who drive the plot forward. These folks all just seemed along for the ride.

The book also has identity problems. Although it clearly aspires to be literary fiction, it is more of a romance, with too much formula and too little substance, the author's attention to historical detail notwithstanding. I used to edit mass market paperbacks in a prior life, including genre fiction, and this had all too much in common with historical romances (aka bodice rippers) and Harlequin romances but with too little of any of the elements that attract the devotees of those genres. At other times, it seemed almost like reportage of the characters' lives, too removed from the events at hand and their effects on the characters to pull the reader in. Yet that reportage was largely impressionistic, in that there were various plot elements that were not resolved nicely. What was Frankie's trip from Bayonne back to Paris like? What was going through her mind when she crossed the Channel? Instead, we find her back in America en route to Franklin, with only passing references to how she got there. And then the last chapter or two were crammed with events, as if the author was finally bored and wanted to tie things up and move on.

Also disconcerting was the author's tendency to switch points of view from one character to the next with little or no warning. Not only is omniscient point of view difficult to pull off well, the constantly shifting perspective created confusion and contributed to the lack of connection with the characters.

The only time "The Postmistress" approached any kind of emotional depth was when Frankie was recording the details of the refugees' lives, including the two that continued to haunt her. But those were too few and too far between, and Blake's repeated references to them came to detract from their power. The brief attention paid to Otto, the Austrian refugee living in Franklin, MA, also promised to finally infuse the book with an emotional dimension, but again it was too fleeting and cursory to fulfill its promise. How did he wind up in a small resort town on Cape Cod, rather than in one of the East Coast cities? Who was he in his previous life? What happened to him?

I also have an issue with the promotional copy for the book, which implies that a decision by the postmaster/mistress not to deliver a letter was a pivotal event. Instead it came about 3/4 of the way through the book and while it tugged at Iris's conscience briefly, it in no way advanced the plot, nor did it reveal anything about the character. It's probably reflective of the book's myriad problems that the editor had to seize on something so late in the story and so inconsequential to try to sell the book.

I actually think Sarah Blake has a lot of promise as a writer, and the idea behind "The Postmistress" was interesting, but she has a lot of seasoning ahead of her before she will realize that potential. I'd suggest giving this one a miss and seeing what she comes up with later in her career.