Not about heroes...

Part of my journey in the two weeks of writing workshops was a stop at West Point, where my nephew Quinn is in his final year. It was a brief visit, just enough time for a burger at his club's tailgate after the football game, then a quick tour of the campus in the swiftly dimming light.

I'd been at West Point twice before, because my sister and I grew up reading the novels of Janet Lambert, who set many of her novels in the area surrounding the US Military Academy. She was married to an Army officer, and wrote wonderful books for teenagers set mainly on Army posts or with some military connection. Her first book, Star Spangled Summer, was published in 1941, and she wrote continuously until her final book in 1969, Here's Marny.

Janet Lambert

Her Army-related books started just before World War II, included a heartbreaking foray into Korea, and ended with Vietnam. In Star Spangled Summer, which is a Penny Parrish book, her sister Tippy is four years old. Here's Marny, Lambert's final book, is focused on a young orphan who lives with Tippy and her husband 28 years later, making Tippy in her early thirties.

Throughout the books the characters age in real time, live in various places in the US and around the world, and have intersecting stories in which characters weave in and out of each other's lives as we so often do.

My sister Mic and I loved those books, and we both still re-read them to this day. Yes, we read other things as well, but neither of us has ever outgrown our love for the Parrishes and the Jordans, with a dash of Candy Kane thrown in for good measure. She did write some other non-Army books, though none of them captured our hearts in the same way.

Why did we fall in love with those characters and the world they lived in? Maybe part of it was the mystique of the military. When we were growing up in the late 50's and throughout the 60's, we believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of the military. We didn't really understand the reality of war, except when a much loved character would die.

It wasn't always a safe world she created. At the same time, her characters took on their challenges with grace and enthusiasm for the most part. Janet Lambert wrote about veterans living with pain from their wounds, death, the effects of war on the losing country - she handled big subjects, and she made them personal and intimate in their impact on character and reader alike.

From sixteen-year-old Jennifer valiantly coping with the seven young Jordans while her father was off fighting WWII, to Tippy Parrish unceremoniously yanked out of her happy teenage life on Governor's Island and thrust into the grim reality of a defeated, bombed Germany post WWII, Lambert tells warm, tender stories against a background of a world that no longer exists in the same way.

Mic and I laughed at ourselves, because we needed a box of tissues nearby every time we read Don't Cry Little Girl. We talked about the Parrishes and the Jordons as if they were our own family. And we both delighted in A Song in Their Hearts, when Candy Kane and her husband Barton became friends with Tippy and Peter.

Janet Lambert was a world-builder and a developer of wonderful characters, not all of them nice. Gwen Jordon takes the prize for complexity, though there are a few others who give her a run for her money. One of the most interesting is Davy Parrish, son of David, the hero of the first book. Davy is stricken with polio when a very young boy, and the complications from that reverberate through the rest of the series as Davy tries to follow in his father's footsteps as a West Point cadet.

Which brings me full circle to my experience of visiting West Point with my nephew Quinn. His twin, Lane, is also in his final year of Army ROTC at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and now I begin to understand the gallantry of Marjorie Parrish and Jennifer Jordon and all of the people who had a loved one in harm's way in her books. Lane and Quinn will be second lieutenants by this time next year, stationed who knows where, and while I'm proud of them and their commitment to service, I am also well aware of the dangers they will face.

When I read Janet Lambert books now, they will have a resonance they never had before. It makes me wonder if, as a writer, I will write something that will resonate for someone I will never meet...

One footnote on the title of this post - Not About Heroes is the title of a play on the WWI poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The play title was ironic, as is the post title. It is not about heroes, and yet it is. Owen's work, in particular, is heart-wrenching in its expression of the realities of war, and heartbreaking because he was one of the casualties of the war. I don't think of war itself as heroic; rather the willingness to put oneself in harm's way to protect others, many of whom you will never know - that is heroic. To carry on quietly the life at home while a loved one is away at war - that, too, is heroic. So this is not about heroes, and yet it is...

Quinn

Lane