Manhattan Beach

Author: Jennifer Egan
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Scribner, 2017
Pages: 448
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that belonged to men, now soldiers abroad. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished. 

With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan's first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. 

Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world.

Review: I've read many books set during World War II, but few that took place in the United States and certainly none with a female working in a naval yard as the main character. Sections of this seemed far fetched, but that's the beauty of fiction. It was an interesting novel.