WITH EVERY LETTER BY SARAH SUNDIN

WITH EVERY LETTER by SARAH SUNDIN is the first book in her WINGS OF THE NIGHTINGALE series. The novel is set in 1942 during the second world war, mostly in North Africa.
Philomela Blake (whose name means "nightingale") has spent a great deal of her life in the jungle with her botanist father, and has always been a bit of a misfit due to her unusual looks and desperate shyness. Her mother, who died in a car accident when she was two years old, was half Filipino, which accounts for her rather exotic looks. She has a large mouth and is afraid to smile because of the cruelty of her classmates who say she looks like a monkey when she smiles, and she has never cut her hair, which she wears plaited in coils around her head. Her father says she is a rare orchid. She is afraid that if she cuts her hair she will end up like her mother, who became a party animal after cutting her hair and neglected her husband and daughter.
Mellie, as she is called by her father with whom she is very close, and later by the nurses in the army air force, has a real problem making friends. She has a scrapbook with photos she has cut out of magazines, and these are her "friends". Some are photos of real people who have terrible problems, one of whom is Tom MacGilliver whose father was executed for murder when Tom was seven, and Mellie prays for him and others who are suffering in various ways. She has a compassionate heart, is a caring and efficient nurse, and does all she can to help her patients, often singing to them with her beautiful voice. Her father calls her an angel of mercy. Being friendly comes easily to her in a hospital ward, but in she is hopeless at social functions. She has no self image and doesn't see how beautiful she really is when she looks in the mirror. She cuts her hair when it becomes hard to manage in North Africa, and realizes that cutting her hair will not make her like her mother! She is a person in her own right and is responsible before the Lord for her own actions and not her mother's or anyone else's.
She is transferred from the Walter Reed Memorial Hospital to the air evacuation unit at Bowman Field. We see how hard she tries to make friends, as her job depends on it, and the mistakes she makes along the way. She becomes involved in anonymous letter writing, and finds that she can really be herself in this kind of relationship.
Tom MacGilliver is her anonymous correspondent. He can also be himself in such a situation. He has a lot to live down being the son of a murderer, but he will not take the easy way out and change his name. He has some happy memories of his father before he became a drunkard. Tom smiles a lot and is determined not to be seen as a killer. He finds it hard making friends and finds leadership hard. He befriends a dog in the war torn country and lavishes affection on him. He calls him Sesame, and when Mellie sees him with the dog she knows he is her secret correspondant. He is an engineer and wants to build bridges between people, not kill them. He nearly gets his sergeant, Larry Fong, who is his only real friend in the platoon, killed, because he doesn't shoot an enemy sniper when he has the chance. He is a strong Christian and tries to do the right thing in every situation. Both Mellie and Tom have let friends down, been the target of cruel attacks and have been betrayed by those they thought they could trust.
The relationship between Mellie (Annie) and Tom (Ernest) flourishes as they can really open up to one another. They become really good friends and eventually fall in love. Will Mellie, who knows Tom's identity, take the chance of revealing her own identity to him and risk being hurt if he is repulsed by her looks? She feels she owes it to him and is being selfish putting her own fear of being hurt before his feelings.
This novel has a really good message and I can highly recommend it. I am looking forward to the next novel in the series.




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