Wax - Softcover

A combination coming-of-age story and mystery, following Matilda Tilly Bettencourt as she struggles against traditional expectations of women in the 1940s. Smith follows young, beautiful Tilly Bettencourt from the moment she makes the life-changing decision to leave her family and join the war effort as a metal welder. Settled across the country, Tilly begins a lifelong friendship with her roommate, Doris, and their neighbor, Sylvia. Doris soon discovers that she is an heir to a piece of property close to Tilly s hometown. After the war is over, the roommates reunite to start a candle-making business on Doris inherited property. Unknown to Tilly and Doris, however, is a secret past that binds the girls families and threatens their dreams. An act of arson that destroys the girls business finally forces the secret to light. Together, Tilly, Doris and Sylvia struggle to realize a life outside mainstream expectations for women in the 40s. While the author touches on important sociopolitical issues of the times racism, women s rights and homophobia history is incidental to the story. Smith works in broad strokes, skimming over the secrecy of gay life during the 40s and the dramatic fallout of family betrayal. The author focuses instead on character-driven plot points: the assistance of a handsome carpenter in remodeling a cottage, the challenges of first-time entrepreneurship and the heartache that characters experience searching for romantic love. Smith draws on strong, clearly defined characters to deliver a mostly linear story about family betrayal and personal integrity. Smith s richly imagined characters breathe life into this look at female friendship in a time of limited social opportunity for women, as well as the enduring power of friendship to transcend almost any challenge. --Kirkus

WAX, by Therese Ambrosi Smith, is a story inspired by Rosie the Riveter and the women who stepped up, and into the industrial void that was left when practically an entire generation of American men went away to war. They became silent partners in the war effort, the cogs and the gears of the American war machine, and without their efforts the solid foundation, upon which the war was being fought, would have crumbled. Waitresses, sales girls, and homemakers, these women braved the unknown to be a part of something bigger than themselves, and end up learning that they were never small to begin with. By setting the novel during a time in American history when women were encouraged to step out of the kitchen, literally and metaphorically, and into roles that they would never have been allowed to pursue during peacetime, Smith challenges her characters, and readers, to question the very nature of gender limitations, and expectation. The war effort itself could easily have become a major character in this novel but, instead, Smith does a magnificent job of simply placing the story, and its characters, in an historically, and emotionally, relevant context. She recognizes how much potential there is for character growth in her chosen setting and uses that as a vehicle to take her characters places they normally wouldn't have gone; making them see things in themselves that would have otherwise stayed hidden beneath their mother's hand-me-down aprons. And then, just as the characters adjust to their new realities as welders, painters, and dozens of other normally male-dominated professions, with financial and emotional independence, the war ends and these women are expected to somehow fit themselves back into their old lives and expectations. That is where the novel really spreads its wings and starts to fly. The relationships these characters have with each other, and with themselves, are so real and honest that they jump from the page, and make you care about them as though they were long-cherished friends. I found myself in every character in this book, their fears and their joys, their ambitions and their self-doubt these characters cry and breathe and laugh, and hold a mirror up to our own era, with its lingering biases and judgements. While this time in American history is, undoubtedly, significant in a thousand ways, I probably would not pick up a textbook to read about it. I want to read about people. The stories and characters within historical fiction often seem provided simply as a pretext for teaching people about the chosen historical era. What delighted me about WAX is that Therese Ambrosi Smith uses the era to the teach the characters and the reader about themselves. Touching and funny, with good pacing, and amazing characters, WAX is a novel that only disappoints in that it ends too soon, and doesn't have a sequel waiting in the wings. Reviewer: J.P. Layberry Allbooks --All Books Review