Julienna/Julie
A Novel A search for hope; the ordeal of an adolescent idealist in the era of W.W. II
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About the Book
A young girl on a farm near a small town in Massachusetts in the decade before World War II, is one of four children whose parents have a detached relationship with them. Julienna, the youngest, feels unwanted, lonely and burdened with duties as the older children leave home. She is small and alert , an avid reader, being required since the age of six to read American fiction to her ailing mother, a lettered, introverted semi-invalid. The stories range from Cooper, Irving. Hawthorne and the poems of Longfellow and Lowell. One brother, three years older, is her only source of family friendliness, leaves for the Navy in l942 when she is thirteen.
“Bucky” Bolton, a boy her brother’s age, moves into the neighborhood to attend the same country grade-school where she is an outstanding student. He is quiet, serious-minded, with an understanding of Julienna’s family problem. On a summer’s outing he saves her life in a near-drowning incident. Soon, she realizes she is in love with him. Their relationship becomes one of mutual appreciation and they pledge themselves when she is but fourteen and he is drafted into the Navy.
He mother’s death and the wounding of her brother in the Pacific theater , bring psychological awakenings. She encourages “Bucky” through her letters while he is in the service and puts aside her small savings from earnings from work after-school hours to assist him in his plan to attend medical school in the footsteps of his deceased father, when the war is over. Her life before “Bucky” had been lonely and without affection, but now her hope was an idealized dream of the future with him after his return home.
The news that his destroyer-escort ship had been torpedoed by a German U-boat listed his name among the missing. Her world crumbled, yet she held to the hope that he would be found. He was never heard from.
About the Author
The author is an attorney still exerting himself in Florida, although candidly admitting to an age that normally spells retirement. He is a collector of porcelain antiques and an aficionado of fine art, especially the English Pre-Raphaelites. An student of history, he is presently engaged in a Memoir on the Romanticists of the XIXth century Regency era.