Synopses & Reviews
Their lives are our lives, their stories our stories, and Marge Piercy has succeeded brilliantly in writing the long-overdue novel of "the other" World War II; not the war fought on the front lines, but the war, fought mostly by women, on the factory lines, the food lines, and behind enemy lines in Europe.
Piercy follows the lives of ten extraordinary people six women and four men as they move through the dizzying atmosphere of the world's wartime capitals; the impulsive couplings and bittersweet partings, the stultifying deprivations and the once-in-a-lifetime chances. Most of all, she shows how World War II became a crucible, where unformed young people were hardened into men and women, charged with saving civilization as no generation had before or has since.
A compelling chronicle of human character in conflict with inhuman events Gone to Soldiers is an unforgettable reading experience, a stirring tribute to the remarkable survival of the human spirit.
Review
"A sense of urgency blows through Gone to Soldiers, strong enough to carry even showers of details behind it....Gone to Soldiers is a literary triumph for Marge Piercy and a landmark volume in the literature of war. As few novels have done, it takes into account the way that war affects old people, women, children, even animals and plant life, as well as the 'official' participants in battle, the soldiers." USA Today
Review
"...what Marge Piercy has achieved with her stunning 703-page opus, Gone to Soldiers, is unquestionably literature a novel that moves as easily from battlefield to home front as it does from female to male perspective....Piercy is as much a poet as a novelist, with a poet's gift for language and capturing the moment in essential details...Piercy has brought that poetry into Gone to Soldiers, the sweep of change, loss, and growth, the feel of life going on the lives that will eventually become our own." Dorothy Allison, Village Voice
Review
"Piercy's war takes on universality of a sort that Hemingway's war, or Mailer's war, could never have achieved....she has mastered a huge subject, dismantled a centuries-old sex barrier and widened our perceptions of both war and literature. All this in a good beach book makes Gone to Soldiers a victory by any standards." Newsweek
Review
"This book deserves to have an entire book written about it...a landmark piece of literary prose....in Piercy's hands, that war is new again, in its awfulness, its quirkiness, the idiosyncratic peculiarities....this could be the most thorough and most captivating, most engrossing novel ever written about World War II." Carolyn See, LA Times
Synopsis
In a stunning tour-de-force, Marge Piercy has woven a tapestry of World War II, of six women and four men, who fought and died, worked and worried, and moved through the dizzying days of the war. A compelling chronicle of humans in conflict with inhuman events, GONE TO SOLIDERS is an unforgettable reading experience and a stirring tribute to the remarkable survival of the human spirit.
"Panoramic...This is a sweeping epic in the best sense."
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER