Award winning author Jack W. London is a gifted storyteller! The prologue’s opening scene at a funeral sets the stage for a story that is full of small town rumors and gossip and secrets galore. Chapter One opens with twelve year old Sandy Clayton and his friends playing war games in the small West Texas town of Tierra, circa 1944. Soon we are introduced to Miss Virginia Sullivan, the title character, and we are instantly drawn into this wartime drama where scandals on the home front can prove almost as deadly as the bullets and bombs of a war raging across Europe and the Pacific.All of the characters in this story feel like real people. You might love some and hate others, but either way you will find yourself quickly involved in their lives. One of my favorite characters is Old Mr. Bradley, the town barber. His conversations with young Sandy Clayton about the military had me in stitches. At other times I was in tears.
And about Virginia herself. You love her when she’s mixing up a special cake to serve her brother Bart and Poppy (her father who pretty much runs the town), and by the end of book one you are left with more questions than answers about who is really the father of Virginia’s baby. I can hardly wait to find out. Waiting for the second installment in the trilogy.