The Stolen Marriage - Review

The Stolen Marriage  🌟🌟🌟🌟
by Diane Chamberlain
Published October 3 2017 by St Martin's Press

Despite a rather slow beginning and a few flaws, this book, full of history from the 1944 era, eventually had my attention as the characters grew into themselves.  Set mostly in Hickory, NC, we are aware that there are men from town who have gone off to war, that this is a time when women and blacks were to know their places, and that polio was becoming  a force to be reckoned with.  While Tess' fiancé is in Chicago treating polio, she makes an irreversible error in judgment and marries a virtual stranger with an unwelcoming matriarch of a mother and sister.  Soon she discovers that her new husband has many odd behaviors  and secrets.  Some of the reveals I saw coming, but only to a degree.

As a little girl growing up in a small town during the 50's, I knew a few people with polio (a friend's cousin two years older who was beautiful but nevertheless taunted by school children for her limp, a boy two blocks away who was my oldest brother's age, my 7th grade math teacher),  and we knew how lucky my family was to have been untouched.  We experienced the polio vaccines administered by shots and then on sugar cubes (Blech!  I actually spit mine out when no one was looking, which then worried me for years to come).  Diane Chamberlain is a fine teller of real historical events with her own twists  added, and the makeshift polio hospital they built in Hickory in a fifty-four hour time period was fascinating to read about, enough so that Life magazine visited soon after its opening.   The author's version of the story teaches how we adapt to our circumstances and overcome adversity.  I thought she did an admirable job, and I thank the publisher and NetGalley for my advance copy.