There are two reasons this book interested me, one I love stories of the Titanic. I remember in the mid-80’s going to my grandma’s and seeing the National Geographic that had just come out with all the pictures after it had just been discovered. Pictures of the ship where if finally came to rest, the shoes lying on the ocean floor, the dishes still in stacks, the face from some little girl’s doll. Then I went to the Titanic Exhibit at the Science Museum in Chicago, which was very eye opening from touching ice the temperature of that night, to getting a card of a passenger and in the end seeing if you survived or perished. And of course the movie, who doesn’t like a good love story, however fictitious. Second, the character Anna Halversson. My middle name is Ann, my maiden name is Halverson (although we are Norwegian and from Iowa), so why could I not read this book.
The story is about three women, who come together in a single lifeboat, only to come together 20 years later, maybe not face to face, but through kindness in tragedy. Esme, a first-class passenger who was in a loveless marriage to an older man, but hopelessly in love with Charlie, of Boston elite. Charlotte, a pick-pocket and thief traveling in second-class with her “mentor” whom she was in love with, but he was in love with Georgie, a man Charlotte could not compete with. And Anna Halversson, traveling in third-class escorting a friend to Minnesota to be wed to the man Anna was hopelessly in love with, and his brother who loved Anna and would marry her just so she could be related to the one she loved. Fate overtakes everyone’s lives that fateful night, destroying so many, bringing others together, and finding the strength none thought they possessed. Esme and Charlie never find the happiness they had before the sinking, Charlotte found her strength of depending on herself, and Anna found the love she desperately wanted, but so later than she imagined.
I loved this story, however fictionalized it is, because it shows that sometimes in tragedy your inner strength is more powerful, that after time sometimes talking to someone who lived through that tragedy with you, sometimes makes life better. I would recommend this book to those that just need a good Titanic read or a good love story, and maybe not the kind of love story you normally get