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Elaine D Walsh received an honorable mention at the 2012 Southern California Book Festival, was a quarter finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, and is the winner of the Chairman's Award for excellence.
Nimitz Highway and River Street is an intersection on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. This is where Elaine impatiently came out of the womb ready to start on her own personal history. She grew up in upstate New York against the backdrop of the flowering women’s rights movement with different ideas from my mother as to what life as a woman should be. In college, she majored in psychology with the intent of being a “death & dying” counselor. This would be her paying job while she wrote the next great American novel. Plan B kicked in and she graduated with a B.A. in English, packed her car, and upset her parents by moving to Florida in search of her destiny.
Without ever having taken one business course, she created her own brand and became a successful business executive by day and women’s fiction writer by night. So far, she has lived a Lifetime Movie Network life, a mixture of extraordinary, ordinary, mundane, and terrifying, providing her great inspiration and fanning her creative flame.
The most powerful influences in her life and her stories are being a daughter, mother, friend, and soul mate. But as a successful women’s fiction author, does this surprise anyone?
Reviewed by Alice DiNizo for Readers' Favorite
It is the summer of 1953 and three high school friends, Faith, Octavia and Bernadette, live in the New York State town of Port Pompeii which was once an active part of the famous Erie canal system. Faith lives with her father and grandfather in the town's Buxton Inn where residents congregate, watch and drink. Octavia lives with her mother and helps all day, every day, to keep her polio afflicted brother Archie alive. Bernadette lives with her overbearing mother, Savannah Vaughn, whose specialty is peach pie, and her father the mayor of Port Pompeii as they await the return of their son, Lt. Stephen Vaughn, from the fighting in Korea. The three girls' friendship is threatened constantly by Bernadette's outspoken mouth and ways but they live out their lives as best they can. Faith's teenage love, Allen, is lukewarm to their budding romance, derelict, drunken Reverend Pappy Flews rents the abandoned Canaller's Church, and Stephen Vaughn does come home from Korea to the parade and party organized by his mother Savanah. What will happen next in the small town of Port Pompeii?
"Atomic Summer" tells of that long ago time of 1953 when Eisenhower had just been elected President, the Korean War was ending, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted for sharing secrets with the enemy, and Senator Joseph McCarthy was in full battle gear against "communists". Main characters Faith, Octavia, Bernadette, Bernadette's mother Savannah, Faith's Allen and his friend Wesley, and all other characters both major and minor are believable and totally of the times back then. Elaine Walsh has written a delightful and sometimes sad book that tells of a period in not so long ago history. She also writes of people's lives as they picked up from mistakes made and went on living as best as they were able to. Highly recommended for reading lists everywhere.
