Love and War

by L.H. Finigan

An Indie Reader Discovery Award finalist, LOVE AND WAR, spans the 1960s through the lives of two unforgettable Molly Drayton, an antiwar activist whose father becomes under secretary of Defense, and Jack Masterson, a Marine suffering the scars of Vietnam.

Set against the backdrop of that tumultuous decade—the music, the protests, the culture, the unraveling— LOVE AND WAR is a coming of age novel, a love story and a war story, a road trip across America in a troubled time whose politics and passions continue to haunt our own.

In a four star review, Indie Reader "(LOVE AND WAR).. reads like a hybrid of "The Things They Carried", and director Julie Taymor's visual extravaganza "Across the Universe."

The Durham Herald "If you lived through that decade, or are just fascinated with the historical period, …Linda Hanley Finigan's novel LOVE AND WAR offers a ride you will willingly want to take from the opening pages."

Molly Drayton, the idealistic daughter of Republican parents, is twelve years old when she tells JFK that she loves him at a New York campaign stop in 1960. Across the country, thirteen year-old Jack Masterson and his widowed mother are leaving Ohio for a new life in California.

In alternating chapters, Molly and Jack journey toward their eventual meeting in 1970, a parallel narrative through the counter-culture wars at home and the battlefields of Vietnam.

When a chance meeting brings them together, they embark on a cross-country road trip and a volatile love affair, both fleeing the dissolution of the world they knew. Jack is a shattered veteran of the war. Estranged from her powerful family, disillusioned by the violent collapse of the protest movement, Molly hopes her love will free them.

Finigan's light touch saves the book from becoming simply yet another book about the 1960s," Indie Reader's reviewer writes. "…LOVE AND WAR is a worthy choice for anyone who understands how loving someone can be both a miraculous and painful choice.

373 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 20, 2011

About the author

L.H. Finigan is a New England novelist and playwright whose current novel, “Summer People,” was praised by Kirkus Reviews as “an ambitious and affecting interweaving of troubled characters’ lives.” https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...

She is known for her vivid storytelling and her ability to weave complex emotions into compelling narratives. Her work often explores themes of resilience, transformation, and the enduring power of human connection.

Her first book, "Love and War," was an IndieReader Discovery Award finalist. Their reviewer called it “…a hybrid of "The Things They Carried," and director Julie Taymor's visual extravaganza "Across the Universe."

Her fiction and essays have appeared in newspapers and literary journals across the country. Several of her short plays have been staged in and around Boston, including twice at the acclaimed Boston Theater Marathon.

A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo, she served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Spectrum. She holds a Master’s degree in Radio, Television and Motion Pictures from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Reviews

[Amanda Spake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot? Alive? In school? Not yet born?

If you were alive, you probably remember very well the day JFK was assassinated. The Kennedy assassination – and all the came after it—defined a generation. The generation began that day in Dallas, in 1963 and it ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975—what is now often called “The Sixties”-- but was really twelve years of massive social, cultural and intellectual upheaval that had a lasting and indelible impact on American life.

Whatever you call those who came of age in that period – the Baby Boomers, the Vietnam generation, or the Generation that Refused to Grow Up—the changes this generation forced on society define much of the social progress of this 20th century: civil rights and a legal, economic, and cohesive attack on racism, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, respect for individual rights, a healthy distrust of authority, economic opportunity for minorities and women, a overall belief in the importance of equity in all aspects of life, and the need to speak out and stand up for one’s beliefs.

If you are a member of that generation, or you just want to know more about it, Linda Finigan’s first novel, “Love and War,” is for you.

Molly Drayton, one of the two main characters in the novel, was with her best friend at the upscale Merriwether School for Girls in New York City, when the news of JFK’s assassination reached her. Her parents, members of the upper-class elite, and wedded to the suffocating values of the Fifties, expected Molly to be more or less like them. She was sent to proper private schools, so she could get into a good Ivy League college, make a proper marriage, and begin producing offspring to further the family line and extend the family fortune.

Molly’s father, a top executive at a major defense firm that makes particularly grisly weapons for the U.S. government, is the perpetually absent father. Her mother, a bored, rich and depressed woman, takes trips. Molly’s surrogate mother, and her only real source of affection, is the family’s African American housekeeper, Ida. Molly is an only and lonely child. And one suspects that from the time she was in middle school she was planning her escape from the emptiness of her home life.

These loosely-woven threads of Drayton family life begin to unravel when, to her parents’ horror, Molly graduates from Merriwether, packs up her sweater sets, and heads for the a big, brash, public, New York state university near Buffalo, SUNY Canaswego, rather than one of the elite Seven Sister colleges. To Molly, Canaswego had action and non-stop bustle of a new, foreign city, and it was far north of her parents. Canaswego represented what she had wanted most from college: a way out.

It’s not long before Molly is moving very far out—into the anti-war, and hippie movements. She confronts her father about his work; she embarrasses her mother, seduces the family chauffeur, and basically rebels in all the possible ways a privileged teenager could in those years. After her father is tapped for a major Washington political job in the Defense Department hierarchy, and her mother dies on a trip, Molly separates totally from her family, losing not only her father’s respect, but his protection. Soon, she is wanted by the law for her anti-war activities.

The other main character in “Love and War,” Jack Masterson, is looking for his own way out 3000 miles away on essentially another planet, California. A working class guy from a family that seldom could make ends meet, Jack doesn’t see college or much at all in his future when he finds himself, a senior in high school, delivering pizza’s trimming hedging, and dating a girl who wants to settle down and pick out silver patterns before Jack had a chance to see any of the world.

After Jack’s mother, Edna, a widow, announces plans to marry Larry, a truck driver she’s been dating, and move back east with him to Queens to open an auto repair business, Jack realizes the time has come to make some quick decisions. He’s smart enough to see that the marriage will help his mother, but he realizes he’s too old to tag along after the newlyweds, sleeping their den, when they really don’t want him around.

Jack see the thing to do, the option always open to him is right in front of him: enlist in the Marines. The military offers everything Jack lacks: a job, an income, a place to live, a future—maybe. But the first thing the military offers is an all-expense paid trip to Vietnam.

In Vietnam, Jack begins to learn more than he ever wanted to know about the world, and what a cruel place it is. This book is not about what happened to men in Vietnam. There are many excellent novels and nonfiction accounts of that war. But there is enough here to give the reader of flavor o Jack’s life in the war zone. Suffice it to say, he made it back in one piece –physically. But like so many Vietnam vets, psychologically, Jack never really comes back from the war.

Then, one dark and lonely night, on an Arizona New Mexico highway, he picks up a hitchhiker, a woman, young, pretty, a young woman fleeing from some unknown terror: Molly Drayton.

The heart of “Love and War,” is the separate and then intertwining story of how these two very different young people meet, fall in love, and break apart again. This story is the best part of the book, and for me, should have been THE book. Molly and Jack together on the road, together in motels, and diners, talking, fighting, hating and loving—this is where “Love and War” shines. The dialogue is funny, crisp and real. The scenes are achingly believable. The narrative drives forward revealing this rich, sustaining inner world of these two people, even as the outside world crashes around them in an escalating foreign war as the body count rises. You want so much for this love affair to last, and at the same time, you know it never will. Jack and Molly are too young, too damaged, both still too much at war within themselves to let their love for one another win out.

But the story of how they TRY and what they discover about themselves and the amazing times they are living in–our own recent history—is worth the ride.

[Dan Duffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finigan's book explores struggles faced by Molly (college student) and Jack (Vietnam Vet) before and after meeting each other. Her book helps me to understand what my older brother had to deal with after returning from Vietnam.
I know he had PTSD although the military hadn't yet identified it as a diagnosis. This quote sums it up for me: "Some days it took time to re-enter the world of the living, to emerge from the pull of dreams, another plane of existence where he had a life and responsibilities that were almost more real than his daylight world. In the light of noon, it seemed unconscionable, what he had done. Involving Molly in the wreck that was his life."

[Mary Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific love story set mostly in the 1960s. Molly Drayton, a war protester and daughter of a high-powered Washington Republican, encounters Jack Drayton, a Vietnam vet who is far removed from the life Molly has known. (The war scenes are brief but VERY powerful.) Finigan gets inside the heads of these two characters while also vividly capturing the drama of war and politics during the era. Beautiful writing, compelling story.