Enthralling. Captivating. I was shocked by The One True Love of Alice-Ann. I could not put it down until I’d read it from cover to cover. Alice-Ann was more like a movie than a book. The author, Eva Marie Everson, has created a full screen novel of life in a sleepy southern town in 1941. When Pearl Harbor was attacked. When young men rushed eagerly to war. When an awkward 16 year old falls in love- or does she? And when the men don’t return, or come back broken in body and spirit.
Why was I shocked by The One True Love of Alice-Ann? Because romance novels are at the bottom of my reading list. Give me a detective or legal thriller, please. Yet this book amazed me. I crouched in Alice-Ann’s bedroom, watching her weep over precious letters from the man of her fantasies. I hid behind the door as she tended to a friend who came home blinded and crippled. I eavesdropped on Alice-Ann’s conversations with her father, aunt, friends. I heard her crying. I watched her grow up in a time of great despair.
Alice-Ann was an inspiration to me, and I’m 50+ years older! She served and loved and judged and prayed and cried. Wait a minute. Alice-Ann is not real, is she? Eva Marie Everson has a gift, folks. Whatever your preferred genre of books, The One True Love of Alice-Ann should be on your reading list. Read it in full technicolor. You won’t be disappointed. 
