Two stars at best. i WANTED to like this book, was excited when i got it...yet, i could not waste the time to finish it which is highly unusual for me. Somewhat boring and disjointed, i may be one of the few here who just did not get the oomph i need to slog through the entire book. Maybe i missed something 3 pages away...... ( )

I definitely enojyed this one. The effects of WWII on a small town - those that left and came back, those that didn't come back, and the women and families tied to those soldiers. It's not a tear-jerker but will pull at your heartstrings throughout the story. ( )

I am sorry to say that I had this book on my shelf for four years because of the title. Next to Love by Ellen Feldman stayed there because of the title threw me off. This is not a book about romance but about the effects of war on all kinds of love. Not just couple love but a love a child for its parent. This is the story of three woman, friends since kindergarten, their husbands and their children and the terrible cost of war. Each woman and man were totally unprepared for what it would be like when their men went to war. They all had different backgrounds, different ideas of what life should be, how do the women wait for their men to come home, if they come home, injured or dead?

The preparation for facing the extremely horrible sights, smells of war and losing friends were grossly inadequate for the men. Many had PTSD. This book is set in the U.S. and before, during and after WWII. The book speaks the truth about the war being so tragic, so horrible so obscene that it was impossible to write home about it the letters. So a good deal of the letters focused on how much the man loved and missed the woman. I can see that clearly in this book and also in my father’s letters when he was serving during WWII.

I am impressed that the author did not limit herself to just the damage to the men and the women but also those others at home, the little children, the fathers and mothers.

This is an extraordinary portrayal of the emotional costs of war and how people tried to cope, some successfully, others not. I am a baby boomer so I was shielded by my parents about what happened then except for the deaths. But I am old enough to remember the Korean War and know about the damage that it can do the children when their fathers left. We are all aware of PTSD during the Vietnam War and all the wars that have followed. This book shows that it doesn’t matter which war. The problems are timeless.

I don’t want to give away the story, what I do want to do is to plea with you to read it and feel and think about it instead. ( )

The opening of Next to Love is brilliant. A telegraph operator is the first to learn which men from the town have died in war. The story line then backtracks: three women in the town marry in anticipation of WWII, then we follow the couples into the war and out the other side. No one emerges unscathed; what Ellen Feldman does so well is show us the variety of ways in which people can be destroyed or scarred by war and, in some cases, eventually heal. Well-written and well-paced, this book neatly characterizes a slice of American social history. ( )

So many books set during World War II seem to romanticize the whole time period, so it was refreshing to read a book that portrays both the period, the events of the time and their affect on the people living through those events with something resembling historical accuracy.

The story follows the lives of three high school friends, Babe, Grace and Millie through the war and the twenty years following it. Grace is from the upper crust of their small Massachusetts town and marries the son of one of the town's leading citizens. Bae is from the wrong side of the tracks, but attracts a boy from the very right side and makes her way with intelligence and dignity, mostly leaving her family behind. Millie is just a silly girls who loves the wild younger son of the local druggist and fills her mind with nothing more than making a home and having babies. The three husbands all go off to war together and are a part of the great D-Day invasion, but only Babe's husband comes home. And he comes home with what today we would call PTSD, but which back in the 1950's no one wanted to talk about at all.

The women pick up the pieces of their lives after the war and carry on. Babe copes with a husband who never seems to be able to get over the trauma of his wartime experience. Grace builds a shrine to her fallen husband in the house they used to share and tries to keep the world (and especially other men) at bay. And Millie, who doesn't think too much about anything, almost instantly finds a new husband with just one little problem - he's Jewish.

Throughout the years, what sustains all three is their friendship. Their are fights and squabbles, but the deep love they have for one another keeps them all afloat as they march into the brave post-war world. I thought this was going to be a breezy summer read, but it was much better than that. ( )