This is one type of book I like---fictional characters in a historical setting, with some real people showing up in the action. ( I had to google once in awhile to see who was real and who was fictional.)
Sydney Stringfellow, young, naive, and straight from Chesapeake Bay, finds herself invited to swim in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where she falls in love with a German man. A Nazi? Or not? Returning home and alone again, she marries Jimmy, an American Marine ready to ship out to Guadacanal.
Bliss, Remembered is the life story that aging Sydney, now dying of cancer, chooses to tell her son. Nothing in her life had actually happened the way her family had always believed, and now Sydney decides to tell the truth before her death.
Sydney asks her son, "What would you be willing to do for love?" and that's the answer she reveals as she talks. The narrative is Sydney's conversation with her son, sometimes interrupted for a question from him or an explanation--or a gin and tonic. It's a different style, and one I found I liked, as Sydney's own voice, and her son's questions, help the reader know both of them.
Through the book, I experienced life on Chesapeake Bay and in New York of the 1930's, learned about history of the Olympics in those years and about Hitler's Germany. But, much of the book was timeless: about whom people choose to love and how major world events can totally change a person's plans.
I didn't see the ending coming, but it was believable and "happy" and satisfactorily tied the story together. (Thanks very much for the recommendation, Ann Yates!)
(The book's cover above shows a young woman swimming on the top half, and marching troops on the bottom half. It fits the book, but doesn't grab a reader's attention, I didn't think.)
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