ON DISTANT SHORES: A NOVEL (SARAH SUNDIN)

 

 

Story Description:

 

Baker Publishing Group|August 1, 2013|Trade Paperback|ISBN: 978-0-8007-2082-7

 

Lt. Georgiana Taylor has everything she could want.  A comfortable boyfriend back home, a loving family, and a challenging job as a flight nurse.  But in July 1943, Georgie’s cozy life gets decidedly more complicated when she meets pharmacist Sgt. John Hutchinson.  Hutch resents the lack of respect he gets as a non-commissioned serviceman and hates how the war keeps him from his fiancée. While Georgie and Hutch share a love of the starry night skies over Sicily, their lives back home are falling apart.  Can they weather the hurt and betrayal?  Or will the pressures of war destroy the fragile connection they’ve made? 

 

My Review:

 

Lt. Georgiana Taylor is a flight nurse with the 802^nd Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron.  Georgiana and five other nurses make up her team who provide medical aid to the boys and men fighting in the war.  Providing treatment of injuries in air saves many more lives than waiting until they can cross ground to get to a field hospital.  This early intervention is worth its weight in gold.  They treat everything from mild shock to dysentery to malaria to horrible amputations.  One must be of strong mind and body to work in this field. 

 

It is July of 1943 and Georgiana is flying back to base with casualties from Gela, Sicily.  She hops between patients taking notes and assessing each patient carefully for injuries sustained, giving medications when necessary or changing dressings or administering pain medications.  Her job is to keep these men as comfortable as possible until their final destination and she doesn’t like to make mistakes.  She will often have another crew member check her calculations when administering medications to prevent an overdose. 

 

She has a boyfriend, Ward back home who she’s been dating for nine years.  Their plan is to marry and run Ward’s farm together when she’s out of the army.  But her cozy life gets turned upside down when she meets pharmacist John Hutchinson (Hutch) and things begin to heat up.

 

Georgiana outranks Hutch which poses a problem for them in seeing each other and they must be careful and creative with clandestine meetings.  Hutch is a non-commissioned serviceman and detests how the war keeps him from his fiancée, Lillian, back home. 

 

With so many things going on, the seas begin to change and Georgiana and Hutch fall in love but this is an impossible relationship, it just simply cannot work.  Or can it? 

 

With the death of one of Georgiana’s flight nurses, she takes it very, very badly and the grieving is hard.  She becomes a bit bitter.

 

In the meantime, Hutch is busy with a seven-year-old little Italian girl named Lucia who he falls madly in love with and helps her back to health.  Both her legs have been crushed and whether she will ever walk again remains to be seen.  Lucia has no family all of them have been killed in the war so the only place available for her is an orphanage which just kills Hutch to have to leave her there. 

 

Georgiana and Hutch share a love of the starry night skies over Sicily, but their lives back home are falling apart.  Can they withstand the hurt and betrayal?  Or will the pressures of war destroy the fragile connection they’ve made? 

 

On Distant Shores was a captivating read and I’m looking forward to the third and final book in this series due out in 2014.