WWI North America:
The Home Front
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Canada, still a part of the British Empire when World War I broke out, was at war from the time Britain entered it on August 4, 1914. The United States did not declare war against German and its allies until April 6, 1917. On the home front, women had to cope with the absence of their husbands, fathers and brothers, and on the war's end, with the effects of trauma on the men in their lives. Suspicion and prejudice against Americans of German descent was virulent before and during the war, while many German-Americans with family and friends in Germany hoped the U.S. would not enter the war. Toward the end of the war, a worldwide epidemic of a virulent strain of influenza broke out.
The Canadian Home Front During WWI
Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Day the Falls Stood Still (2009), about the daughter of a director of the Niagara Power Company and her love for a riverman who opposes further development at Niagara Falls. Review or Author Interview (See also "Tales of Niagara Falls," an article by Buchanan about some real-life events that inspired the novel)Frances Itani, Deafening (2003), about a deaf Canadian girl, from her childhood through her romance with a man who enlists to fight in the war. Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers (2001), about the building of a monument to Canadians lost in the First World War. Robert MacNeil, Burden of Desire (1992), about a clergyman searching for a woman who lost a sexually revealing diary in the wreckage of the munitions ship that blew up in Nova Scotia. Ami McKay, The Birth House (2006), about a young midwife in Nova Scotia during the war years. Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising (1941), about a munitions ship that exploded and partly destroyed the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917.
The U.S. Home Front During WWI
Andrea Barrett, The Air We Breathe (2007), about patients in a tuberculosis sanitarium during the war years.Beatrice Colin, The Songwriter (2010), about three New Yorkers in the entertainment industry in 1916 as the U.S. enters the war. Glen David Good, Sunnyside (2009), a literary novel woven around the day in 1916 when mass hysteria developed around sightings of comic actor Charlie Chaplin in more than 800 locations around the country simultaneously. Myla Goldberg, Wickett's Remedy (2005), about a young Irish-American widow from Boston who struggles to keep her husband's mail-order patent medicine business going after he dies in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Nicole Helget, The Turtle Catcher (2009), about the only daughter in a German immigrant family growing up in rural Minnesota during World War I with the secret knowledge that her body is not like that of other girls. Review Dennis Lehane, The Given Day (2008), about two Boston families, one white, one black, during and after the First World War. Antonia Logue, Charity Girl (2007), about a young Boston woman imprisoned for having a “social disease” during the war. Leila Meacham, Roses (2010), a family saga beginning with a sixteen-year-old girl in a small Texas town who must take over the management of her family's cotton plantation when her brother goes to war. Thomas Mullen, The Last Town on Earth (2006), about a small town in Washington State that quarantined itself from the outside world in 1918 to prevent the Spanish Flu epidemic from reaching them, and what happens when an apparently ill soldier arrives and asks for sanctuary. Christina Schwarz, Drowning Ruth (2000), about tragic family secrets in the aftermath of the First World War. Elswyth Thane, The Light Heart (1947), about two Virginia families during World War I; #4 in the Williamsburg novels. Elswyth Thane, Kissing Kin (1948), about two Virginia families during World War I; #5 in the Williamsburg novels (#6 and #7 set during World War II). Jane Urquhart, The Underpainter (1997), about an American artist whose technique involves painting a scene and adding another layer that obscures it. Ann Weisgarber, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (2008), about a black family in South Dakota in 1917. Janice Woods Windle, Will's War (2002), about prejudice against Americans of German descent in World War I Texas.
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