Constance Bierkan

In Spite of It All Constance Bierkan

This is a fast-moving novel spanning the parallel stories of two characters: New Yorker, Claire Fitzgerald, who has yet to realize her strengths and Frenchwoman Madeleine de Beaulieu whose impetuousness will lead her astray. Claire, a successful model in New York City, marries wealthy Billy Campbell in 1944 and embarks on what she hopes will be an idyllic marriage. Once an "America Firster" when it came to her attitude about the war, she said, "Why expend life and coin abroad when there are needs still unmet at home?" Eventually she becomes ashamed and recants, "How could I have been so shallow, so insular, so terribly selfish?" In France, twenty-year-old Madeleine is dispirited too. According to her the war has robbed her of her best years cooped up with an autocratic and overprotective mother. She longs for romance and is determined to break free because her "daily existence had been an endless salvo of infuriating do's and don'ts." Claire enlists in the Red Cross, hoping to volunteer in the war effort in Europe. Madeleine escapes to Morocco. While these woman each search for second chances and love each is on a collision course with a fate neither anticipates. That it's happening during the discovery of Hitler's propaganda art hidden in the Kaiseroda Mine is a surprising twist of fate. This is a page-turning international tale.