Review: This was brilliant, touching and important...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 8, 2014
I never in a million years thought I'd want to read a book set during the Vietnam War era, but this was just such a painful yet fascinating flashback to that time.  I was alive then, though a mere child.  *coff*  Every evening the nightly news was filled with a long, long list of the dead.  That's my main memory of that time. The story's presentation was so gripping and amusing, initially in the form of Pen Pal letters, in a world before the internet.  Really good writers can preserve history and let people understand how society has changed and what people went through, and this is a gentle reminder of how young people suffered in that era.  Nowadays war has been rather glamorized and sanitized in popular culture.  During the draft era the public had a harsher truth about reality and society was in more turmoil about various issues.  Reading this book really brought some of the seventies back to me and made me happy that we (hopefully) learned some lessons from it.  Besides, this is just a really sweet romance novel.  This author has a nice hand writing historical settings.800,000-3,800,000 - Vietnam War/Second Indochina War Deaths (1955-1975) per Wikipedia