Stella Bain: Book summary and reviews of Stella Bain by Anita Shreve

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Cathryn Conroy

An Eloquent and Moving Novel About the Emotional Nuances of Memory, Loss, and Love
It all started with a lie. It was a spiteful, cruel lie that a vindictive man convinced his young daughter to tell against the father's hated rival. This remarkable novel by Anita Shreve is a lot of things—a psychological tale, a historical novel, a love story—but most of all, it is a story about one woman's quest for independence in an era that shunned such things.

It was the horrific lie that sent a young American wife and mother to flee her New Hampshire home for the Great War battlefields in France in 1916. She wanted to find the young man, Phillip Asher, whom her family had so wrongly ruined with her daughter's lie. With his reputation shattered, Phillip, too, had fled overseas to the war where he worked as an ambulance driver. Eventually, they do find one another. Phillip suffers a horrific injury, and when she sees his disfigured, ravaged face, she collapses. When she wakes up days later, she is in a different city in France with no memory of who she is or why she is there. But something deep inside her tells her to go to London to the Admiralty. She has no idea why or what it is she is seeking there. She makes up a name for herself: Stella Bain. How Stella physically recovers from the shell shock, how she emotionally recovers the life she once had, and how she finds true love are the gems of this magnificent story of the past, present, and future.

This is a moving, eloquent story that captures the emotional nuances of memory, loss, love, family, and a woman's right to live her life independently.

Diane S.

Stella Bain
When she is found in a hospital camp in France without a memory she gives the nurses the name "Stella Bain. The Great War, 1916, camps in France and England, the horror of war and its effects on the psyches of those involved and a woman with a past that she must uncover. Though it will take a while, she will and this will lead to a court case and a new life, while making peace with her old.

This is when shell shock was first being talked about and studied, the talking cure proposed by Freud was beginning to be used in the treatment of this condition .What makes this book so different is that it recognizes the effects of shell shock on the nurses and the others in the camps who also saw horrible things and had to live with what they had seen. A woman had few choices in this time period and remembering that it is easy to understand some of the decisions she made in her life. The court case I am not sure about, not sure if a judge would have been as fair to a woman as this one was, but it might have helped that her husband was not at all a sympathetic person, thinking he was above even the dictates of the court.

A hopeful book about the rebuilding of a life, Shreve treats her characters with a tenderness and a gentleness and brings them to life. I think she must have liked her character Stella Bain quite a bit. I did too.

ARC from NetGalley.

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