Joanna Scott Liberation

Liberation

Joanna Scott

Little, Brown, Nov 2005, $23.95, 240 pp.

ISBN: 0316010537

Sixty years have passed since the war, but Adriana Rundel still remembers like it was yesterday. In fact just yesterday she celebrated her seventieth birthday with her spouse Robert and their children. This morning as she rides the commuter train from her Jersey Suburban home through Newark to Manhattan, she suffers a heart attack and quickly vanishes inside her memories of WWII, hidden by her affluent family from the Nazis as a ten year old Jewish girl on the isle of Elba.

In 1944 on Elba, Adriana Nardi sees the teenage apparently AWOL Senegalese soldier Amdu Diop, who is hurt, separated from his unit, and trying to hide. As she tries to help the injured bungling soldier, she also becomes infatuated with him, while he hopes to become a savior of mankind. However, her family will tragically soon intercede.

LIBERATION is a well written character study that compares the present with the past in the life of a survivor. Intriguingly Mrs. Rundel does the comparison between her exciting but dangerous childhood during WWII, especially once her soldier enters her life to the boring but safe septuagenarian she has become. Though the other passengers on the Penn Station bound train seem like intruders on a personal tale between the lead protagonist and the audience, fans of powerfully profound dramas will treasure Joanna Scott's insightful tale.