Good Night, Irene by Luis Aleberto Urrea - 17/20 of Books of Summer

Title: Good Night, Irene
Author: Luis Aleberto Urrea
Publication: Little, Brown & Co., hardcover, 2023
Genre: Historical Fiction
Setting: WWII

There are books about wartime nurses and an abundance (at least, recently) of stories about female spies and even a few aviators, but this was the first book I came across about Donut Dollies! Irene Woodward, a confident New Yorker, and Dorothy Dunford from Indiana, enlist with the Red Cross to operate Clubmobiles – basically to bring trucks full of coffee and donuts and fellowship to the troops. Irene primarily wants an exit strategy from a fiancé who has left her with bruises but she is determined as she heads for training:

She turned toward [a random soldier she met on the train to DC]. “I intend to serve my country,” she said, “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?”

Irene and Dorothy become close friends, although they sometimes squabble and/or disapprove of each other’s behavior. No matter how tired they are, they manage smiles and hot drinks for every soldier who turns up. Irene falls for a soft spoken American fighter pilot who appears and disappears. After D-Day (June 6, 1944), they are sent to France with General Patton’s troops to continue serving Allied forces. It took the Allies two additional months to liberate Paris from the Nazis and the war in Europe lasted another nine months after that until Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. In France, their work was actually dangerous (one day they find a bullet in their snack-bar-bus) but Irene’s letters home focus on the weather, not the actual circumstances, or even the harmless flirtations and adventures she and Dorothy enjoy.

The women posed for snapshots. Dozens of snapshots. It seemed as though every soldier had a Brownie camera in his ruck. They imagined their images in a hundred homes in a hundred cities, and those picture albums lying in a footlocker or a drawer for decades. They imagined that long after the soldiers had become old, perhaps even after they’d died, someone would come to wonder about these women holding up rifles or tommy guns or donuts and laughing with their grandfather in front of the big dark truck.

This book was inspired by the author’s mother’s WWII service, so it is based on real people and how they coped during the war, including the friendships that kept them going. It was recommended to me so I was pleased when I came across a copy. Disappointingly, however, I found the actual story less appealing than the premise. The narrative rambled, the characters were one-noters, and their activities seemed very repetitious or else the book was just poorly organized.  Irene and Dorothy never really came alive to me.  I had to make a real effort to finish it.

This is book 17/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

This is book 22 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024.

Source: Personal copy