The Postmistress
Where to buy The Postmistress books online?
Product Description
Unabridged CDs, 9 CDs, 11 hours
Read by TBA
What would take place if a name did the unthinkable-and didn’t deliver a letter? Filled with stunning parallels to today, The Postmistress is a sweeping novel about the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women-and of two countries torn apart by war.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Kathryn Stockett Interviews Sarah Blake
Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she stirred to New York City, where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. The Help is her first novel.
Here she talks with novelist Sarah Blake about her experiences writing The Postmistress.
Kathryn Stockett: I should start by adage that I am honored to be on the same page with you—I loved The Postmistress. The book is so complex, it gives you so much to reflect about and chat about. My first question to you is, how did the book come about? What made you start writing it?
Sarah Blake: Thanks so much, Kathryn—and I’d like to lob persons kind words right back at you; it’s a tremendous thrill for me to be in conversation with the leader of The Help.
The Postmistress started with a picture that sprang into my head one day, of a woman sorting the mail in the back of a post office, quietly slipping a letter into her pocket as a replacement for of delivering it. Immediately, questions flooded forwards: Whose letter was it? Why on planet would she choose to pocket it? What havoc would be wreaked by not delivering a letter? As I answered persons questions, Emma and Will and their like tale, and the workings of the tiny town in which Iris was the center, came to life. One hundred pages into that draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus, out of the blue. I had no thought who she was or why she was there, except that one character referred to her as a war correspondent lacking a war. That was appealing, I thought. By this time I had chose to set the novel in the late thirties, early forties. It was 2001 and I was living in Washington, D.C., after the attacks of 9/11, and I was very distant with trying to make sense of what was happening around me. Were we in danger? Would we go to war? The parallels between that uncertain time and the time before the United States entered World War II resonated with me, and what was a novel about manufacturing accident and fate and the overlapping of lives deepened into a novel with war as its backdrop, which questioned questions about how we know ourselves to be in a past moment and what we do when we are called to it.
Kathryn Stockett: Your book features three different women. From a logistical standpoint, did you find it hard to pull off the different points of view? I know this is something I spend a lot of time on in my work—building sure the voices are distinct and also very much right to the different characters.
Sarah Blake: To be honest, with this novel, the challenge was trying to keep each of these women in line, since each one threatened at some point or another to run away with the tale! It took eight years for this tale to become the novel you have in your hands, and in large part that’s because with the introduction of each character, I establish myself going off and following an individual tale, traveling further and further from a workable plot. By the time I had finished, I had written three separate novels, one for each of the three women—perfect with like affairs, whole families, additional towns—and the challenge came not in trying to keep them distinct, but in trying to figure out how to weave their tales together.
Kathryn Stockett: Who is your favorite character, and why?
Sarah Blake: I’m not sure I can answer that, since there are parts of each of these women I admire, and parts of each of them I don’t like. They are all broken in an essential way—a way I find incredibly appealing. When a reporter finds she cannot tell a tale and a postmaster finds herself unable to pass along a letter, the moments they have arrived at as characters are compelling. Mrs. Cripps was certainly the most fun to write—she didn’t have to carry too much weight in the telling of the tale, and she was such a nosy parker it was fun to write her lines.
Kathryn Stockett: Is there a character in The Postmistress with whom you identify most? (And if you have been having trysts with excellent-looking soldiers in dark alleyways, please share!)
Sarah Blake: Oh, there are bits of me in all three women: certainly Frankie’s rage and sorrow, the desire to get the tale (something I despaired of regularly in the eight years of writing); Iris’s like of order; and Emma’s feeling of invisibility, her longing for the sense that a name would watch over her.
Kathryn Stockett: The most haunting scenes for me—and there were many—were persons of Frankie on the train with Thomas and of the mother and child on the train platform. How did these scenes come about? Were they hard to write?
Sarah Blake: Much of the drive to write the book had to do with my own attempt to write my way toward understanding the sudden, final breaks that crack into our lives, in the form of accidents, death, additional irrevocable events. I have two sons, and while it is impossible for me to imagine putting them on a train by themselves, with nothing but paper to send them to safety, it was simple to conjure feelings of despair and heartbreak. The book is full of mothers and sons being torn apart by childbirth, bombs, and visas; but the last parting—the mother embracing her boy in the train car with Frankie—was probably the most hard to write. It’s the toughest to comprehend, and yet it happened all the time, adage excellent-bye, knowingly, possibly forever.
Kathryn Stockett: What research did you do for past accuracy? You seem to have really nailed the time period.
Sarah Blake: Thank you. I’m glad it feels credible. I read many books on the history of World War II, pored through Life magazines from 1939 to 1945 for a sense of how much things cost and what they looked like, read Federal Writers Project interviews with all types of people living on Cape Cod in the 1930s, watched movies made in 1940 and 1941 (my favorite is The Letter with Bette Davis) in order to get the rhythms of idiomatic speech. I also spent many hours at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and at the Radio & Television Museum in Bowie, Maryland.
(Photo of Kathryn Stockett © Kem Lee)
Buy Cheap The Postmistress Online
No related posts.
This is a gripping, perfectly written novel. I couldn’t place it down! Well done, Ms. Blake.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The Postmistress by Sarah Blake
Genre: Fiction
Rating: DNF
(No Synopsis.)
The thing about reading is that you need to pick up the book, and be wrapped up in it. It needs to flow well. It must be readable. It must be understandable. Words make sentences and sentences make paragraphs, etc.
When I ongoing reading The Postmistress, I felt like I’d jumped into the middle of a book, in the middle of a series, with no thought who was who or what was happening or even who the narrator was. The sentences didn’t make any sense. It was like reading sentences backwards. Have you ever tried that? Do it. Ok now that you’ve tried it, you know how I felt. It felt like a bunch of in a state words.
The style was weird, there was weird punctuation that made what small clear sentences there were choppy and hard to read. I kept reading the same axiom over and over and eventually giving up.
The point of view isn’t first person, nor is it third. And whatever person it was, it kept switching mid-chapter so I couldn’t keep up. The dialogue felt out of place, like people from that time period shouldn’t be language like that (Or maybe I’m just not educated on WWII culture, which is more likely than not. I’ll give the leader the benefit of the doubt).
And by page 15 I still had no clue who was who or what was going on. I felt no desire to continue reading, and trying to decipher the paragraphs felt like a chore.
And honestly, reading should not be a chore. I won’t end a book if I could be reading better things.
I’m sorry to be so negative, I despise writing negative reviews. But I could not read this book. I couldn’t tell you what the plot was or what the characters were like if I tried.
As permanently, please remember that this is my personal opinion. Never choose to read or not to read a book based on one person’s views.
**ARC provided by Bloody Terrible’s borrow my book tour**
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I like the poetic writing and the fantastic evocation of the past time period. I’m interested in the role of women in WWII and I reflect the themes of this book have fantastic potential. I also reasonably liked the jumping around from characters to characters. This made the reading reasonably appealing. As in the case of many modern novels, I was very disappointed with the sudden and seemingly random sexual episodes. While the leader embraces the pretense of writing high-brow literature with gorgeous prose and stunning images, these episodes lower the tone of the novel to mere well loved fiction. I’m not trying to sound elitist because I reflect there is room for the Dan Browns of the fiction world. My disappointment came from the uneven tone of the novel that ranged from high elegance to sloppy and unnecessary realism. I kind of got the feeling that the editors said “Add some spicy scenes to the tale” to sell books. It’s a bring shame on because I reflect the writer has talent and could have written a modern classic. I hope she learns that less really is more.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I just got this book and was very excited until I ongoing reading that it was set on Cape Cod in the town of Franklin, MA. I’ve lived in MA for my entire life and frequently spend summer weekends down “The Cape.” It’s very hard for me to take this book seriously knowing that Franklin, MA is about as far away from Cape Cod as Boston is! I’ve read the first two chapters and am having a very hard time finding it believeable with such a ricdulous, fictional location. What a bummer.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This book , set in 1940-1941, contains three main character groups, each with their own plot (although as the tale progresses, these increasingly intertwine). The title comes from the first plot line – Iris James, the postmaster of a tiny town on Cape Cod. She likes rules and protocols, and has recently met the like of her life, Harry Vale, who spends his days scanning the shore line for the U boats he feels will appear at any day. The second tale follows newlyweds, Emma and Dr. Will Fitch. Emma already has abandonment issues because she has lost her whole family tree, but she feels Will has the ability to place all persons feelings behind her. Finally, Frankie is a female journalist from the United States who reports on the bombings of London, then travels through Europe interviewing Jews who are trying to take advantage of the last tiny opening to place the areas under German control.
While parts of this book were excellent, parts of it were confusing to me. First, the title, “the Postmistress.” Of all the characters in this book, to me the postmistress was the one with the least importance, the one who could have been lost altogether with no detriment to the basic point. The characters of Frankie, Emma, and Will are much more compelling, and much more central to the tale. The choice of Iris billed as a major plot point, but in fact it does nothing to alter or affect anything – it just a fleeting postponing of non-definitive information. A few of their decisions threw me for a loop – I reflect it’s a weird choice to open the book as Iris goes to a doctor to get a certificate of virginity to give to a guy she has yet to have a first date with. And I wanted to strangle both Will and Emma for not thinking a small more clearly. But, there were also redeeming factors. It was nice to read about the early days of WWII from the perspective of three different women, both on the home front and abroad. You could see the tales intertwining from afar, but they came together even more completely than I would have guessed.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5