Book Review: Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea

My Rating: 4.5⭐

“If you get to come home, you will be so grateful you won’t realize at first that you survived. But once you know you survived, you’ll only be starting to understand.”

Inspired by his mother’s Red Cross experience during WWII, Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea is a remarkable work of historical fiction that gives us a glimpse into the contribution of the women of the Clubmobile Corps of the American Red Cross to the war effort.

In 1943, several young women from all across the country signed up with the American Red Cross to serve in the Clubmobile Corps in WWII Europe. Their task was making and serving donuts and coffee, offering a taste of home to those serving on the front, in an effort to boost morale. These young women would be traveling across Europe operating a Clubmobile, a specially designed bus equipped with apparatus for frying donuts and making coffee and stocked with chocolate, cigarettes, magazines chewing gum and so on. Among the “Donut Dollies” as they were referred to, were Irene Woodward, a New Yorker from an affluent family, who flees from her engagement with an abusive partner and Dorothy Dunford, a Midwestern farm girl from Indianapolis, who sells her farm after the death of parents and who lost her brother to the War. Initially not too impressed with their job description, neither of them is aware of the perils they will face, the horrors they will witness and the indelible imprint it will leave on their lives.

“It had not taken them long after arriving at Glatton to understand that their service was not truly about the donuts and coffee. They had seen enough boys fail to return from a morning flight. The real service was that their faces, their voices, their sendoff might be the final blessing from home for some of these young pilots. The enormity of this trivial-seeming job became clearer every day.”

We follow them through their training in the United States to WWII-ravaged Europe as they live through bombardments in London, to the air bases across Europe into the trenches as they follow the Allied troops through D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and onwards as they witness devastation, experience loss and meet several people who would impact the way they perceived not only the realities of war but also how important the role they were playing was. Even though Irene and Dorothy are very different individuals – their backgrounds, their perceptions of their job and how they react to all that they witness and experience – they form a deep friendship. Needless to say, their experiences leave them with scars- both emotional and physical.

“Would carrying all of these sorrows and torments inside her condemn her to a life sentence of silence? She could never apologize enough or give thanks enough for being the survivor.”

The story gives us an insightful glimpse into how women contributed to the war effort on the front - a Red Cross initiative that has rarely been featured in WWII fiction (this is the first time I have come across any reference to the Clubmobile Corps). The author writes with much sensitivity and compassion while depicting the significance of the lighthearted moments of comfort, friendship, music and laughter among those for whom “tomorrow” was uncertain. I loved the moments of camaraderie and between Irene, Dorothy and the troops they meet as well as the moments Irene shares with Hans, the fighter pilot with whom she develops a close bond. The story does start slow and it took a while (around the twenty percent mark) for me to fully engage in the story but I am so glad that I continued to read. Informative, insightful and profoundly moving, this is a story told from a unique perspective that will touch your heart. For those who enjoy WWII fiction, I would not hesitate to recommend this novel.

Many thanks to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.