Good Night, Irene: A Novel
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
This "powerful, uplifting, and deeply personal novel" (Kristin Hannah, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Four Winds), at once "a heart-wrenching wartime drama" (Christina Baker Kline, #1 NYT bestselling author of Orphan Train) and "a moving and graceful tribute to heroic women" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), asks the question: What if a friendship forged on the front lines of war defines a life forever? In the tradition of The Nightingale and Transcription, this is a searing epic based on the magnificent and true story of courageous Red Cross women."Urrea's touch is sure, his exuberance carries you through . . . He is a generous writer, not just in his approach to his craft but in the broader sense of what he feels necessary to capture about life itself." --Financial Times
In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle. After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dorothy, and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact. Taking as inspiration his mother's own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women's heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea's "gifts as a storyteller are prodigious" (NPR).BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
Content warning for violence, war, death, domestic abuse/interpersonal violence, descriptions of concentration camps, state-sponsored violence, and related topics. I liked pieces of this novel, but it started slowly for me. I started to get more invested in the novel in the later 2/3 of it. I liked the characters, especially Dorothy, and the relationship between Dorothy and Irene. I wanted a little more out of Irene's relationship with Handyman, especially considering her experiences with her fiance. I liked the ending, and am pleased with the character development that we saw from both of the main characters.
“Clubmobiles…Mobile service. Comfort, moral support…backing the troops in the field. We make coffee and donuts. In trucks.” Irene Woodward intends to serve her country, “and this is what they’ll let me do. I have never made a donut in my life. I don’t know how to drive a truck. And the coffee I’ve made has been known to incapacitate its victims. So tell me, Sarge–you’re an expert. How will I do?”
“She sipped her wine with profound ennui. ‘I’m hardly a girl, dear boy. I am a Red Cross warrior queen’...They didn’t feel like cooks, didn’t feel like waitresses…they were ass-kicking bitches…cooking up sweet smiles and brewing hot cups of joy…They each felt like war brides to a few thousand husbands…The most important part of their service was their blessing, their flirtation, their ‘Be careful! We’ll be here when you get back!’”
“The D in D-Day stands for Donuts!” They joke until their first mission. “They had fallen out of the world they thought they knew and into a fragmentary place.” A world where bricks flew. Where roofs imploded. Where noise assaulted their ears into deaf silence. “The Occupation had been an opera of awful stupidity, with bellowing and sneering villains in the wings, outrages and swan songs, sirens and explosions and shortages and well-hidden crates of wine.”
“Women are called upon to piece the broken world back together. The boys blow everything up. Including themselves. And then the rest of us. And we bind it all back together–the boys, the world, ourselves…To survive meant a lifetime of forgiving…in a haunted penance she could escape only now by deciding to forgive herself. Whatever lay on the other side of her door, she knew that today she would find reconciliation.”
“It can’t be about killing. It has to be about living. Saving even one life…instead of a death for a death, a life for a death…We are all dead until we awaken, child.”
“Irene, good night
Irene, good night
Good night, Irene, good night, Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams”
So “unass that seat” and pick up your copy of Luis Alberto Urrea’s magnum opus Good Night, Irene today!
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