Home Front Lines by Brenda Sparks Prescott

I had the opportunity to speak with Brenda about the home front and the military spouse’s perspective, as well as her own journey to publishing her first book.Īndy Shi: You come from a family with a military history that extends back to the Civil War. After receiving her MFA from the Stonecoast MFA program and working careers in fundraising and information technology, she now draws on her family’s own military history to tell the wives’ story set against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

News of one son’s scandalous death passes into the hands of a Japanese-American journalist who bears her own scars from Hiroshima: another reminder of the civilian cost of war.īrenda Sparks Prescott is a curator of marginal stories as the co-chief editor of Solstice Literary Magazine. Intrigue proliferates as the fates of Betty and the base commander’s wife are intertwined through events in the Pacific involving their Navy sons. That’s easy to forget when war stories are never about the women and their families.īeyond the women’s perspective of war, Home Front Lines is about race as Betty and Lucy-both African-American-navigate the politics of their base.

Such lines are never so easily demarcated. Their plans feel like abandonment of the husbands and fathers who fight to protect their families, but war makes calculus unforgiving on both the front line and at home. A cook for the Soviet camp, the youngest sister-Lola- one day stumbles upon a Russian missile battery and witnesses the horrible price of accidents, for such a simple mistake as a wrong turn by her driver.Īs the attentions of the men turn toward those on the other side of the Florida Strait, the chance for mistakes multiply, and their wives scramble to plan to send their children away in the event of nuclear war. Over a thousand miles south in Cuba, the Montero sisters watch on as more and more Soviet soldiers move in to support the Revolution. The year is 1962 and Airforce wives Betty Johnson and Lucy Saunders notice the feverish and conspicuously secretive activity exciting their Maryland Air Force base. In Home Front Lines, we are reminded that such trauma is never limited to the battlefield and that it is not carried solely by those shouldering the rucksack.

War stories are found in the trenches and tunnels, written in blood and made indelible by death. It’s a teary reflection at a military grave in Saving Private Ryan. War stories are Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam trauma compartmentalized into stoic lists and the WWII absurdist nihilism of Kurt Vonnegut.

Home Front Lines by Brenda Sparks Prescott