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The War at Home
A Wife's Search for Peace (and Other Missions Impossible): A Memoir
1 of 1 copy available
When she fell in love with her brother’s best friend, Rachel Starnes had no idea she was about to repeat a painful family pattern—marrying a man who leaves regularly and for long stretches to work a dangerous job far from home. Through constant relocations, separations, and the crippling doubts of early parenthood, Starnes effortlessly weaves together strands from her past with the relentless pace of Navy life in a time of war. Searingly honest and emotionally unflinching—and at times laugh out loud funny—Starnes eloquently evokes the challenges she faces in trying to find and claim a sense of home while struggling to chart a new path and avoid passing on the same legacy to her two young sons.
At once a portrait of the devastating strains that military life puts on families and a meditation on what it means to be left behind, The War at Home is a brave portrait of a modern military family and the realities of separation, endurance, and love that overcomes.
“Rachel Starnes’s The War at Home navigates the joys, fears, compromises, and casualties that create the terrain of marriage. And if you are a military spouse, her memoir will reveal thoughts you never even knew you had. This is a wise and fearless book.”
—Siobhan Fallon, author of You Know When the Men Are Gone
“One of the most honest and genuine memoirs I’ve ever read, as well as one of the most finely written. There’s not a false note in these pages. Rachel Starnes’s story is at once both singular and emblematic. . . . The War at Home is that rare thing: a book about the here and now that promises to last well beyond next month or next year.”
—Steve Yarbrough, award-winning author of The Realm of Last Chances and Safe from the Neighbors
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
July 5, 2016 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
- ISBN: 9781101992074
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781101992074
- File size: 574 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781101992074
- File size: 574 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 1, 2016
A Navy wife shares intimate details of what life in the military really means for the family behind the enlisted man.Starnes never expected to become part of the extended military family or to be married to someone who was often gone for long stretches of time. She grew up with a father who was often absent, out working on oil rigs, and she wanted a more stable life for herself and her yet-to-be-born children. But she married a man who wanted to fly Navy fighter jets and suddenly found herself moving across the country after a quick wedding so her husband could attend training school. What unfolds over a period of 10-plus years is an honest portrayal of the difficulties military wives face while their husbands are deployed or so deeply embedded in top-secret trainings that they are unavailable emotionally or physically. With compelling prose, Starnes delves deeply into the emotional ups and downs she experienced as she formed new friendships only to have them torn apart when they needed to move again, of the hurdles she faced raising her two sons for months at a time by herself, and of her own desires to be a writer, to be more than just a military wife, and to have some identity of her own. The author also discusses her struggles with depression, her inability as a child to adjust to her father's long absences, and the painful moments she endured as she and her husband tried to reconnect after each of his many returns. The writing is often dramatic, providing readers with a behind-the-scenes look at military life from a unique perspective: that of the silent partner who endures separation, secrecy, and the fears that her husband may be the one who doesn't make it back. A gripping and guileless account of being the wife of a TOPGUN instructor.COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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