The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

“It makes us all madmen. Cowards and madmen. It’s only the degree that varies.”

The Secret of Raven Point illustrates what war does to people. When the story begins, Juliet Dufresne, an innocent, slightly nerdy high school student in the fictional town of Charlesport, South Carolina, receives her first kiss from Beau, one of the school’s star football players. The other star player is Juliet’s brother Tuck. The year is 1941, and Juliet’s simple, somewhat boring life changes forever when Tuck enlists and gets shipped to the Italian front.

Juliet enrolls in a nursing program where she trains with fellow nurses and role-playing soldiers who holler in mock pain and scream for morphine. War is conceptual, distant, and exciting.

In 1942, the Dufresnes get word that Tuck is MIA, and then receive a rambling and incoherent letter from him, sent before he disappeared. Juliet puzzles over his references to Raven’s Point, a secret place in the woods where the siblings once rescued an injured raven. She believes it is a code, and she sets out to crack it.

While we see Tuck and Juliet together only briefly at the beginning of the book, we are asked to believe that they are extremely close: their mother is dead, their father has remarried, and they have only each other. So it’s a bit of a leap of faith when Juliet, convinced that her brother is still alive, lies about her age, enlists, and heads to Italy to find him—or at least some information about his disappearance. But we take the leap because this is where the tale really picks up steam.

The patients Juliet now cares for, most of them amputees, are very real, and so is their pain and their screams for morphine. They’ve lost limbs, have gangrene and shrapnel in their bodies, and suffer battle fatigue. We watch Juliet grow up before her time as she faces death on a daily basis, holds the hands of dying soldiers, assists with amputations, subsists on little food and even less sleep. Juliet senses “. . . something within her eroding, something she would never restore.”

Enter Barnaby, a comatose soldier who attempted to blow his own head off. He is a social pariah, despised by his fellow soldiers for cowardice. Juliet is assigned to care for him. A psychologist, Dr. Willard, arrives to assess Barnaby’s condition and attempt to get him either back into the war or ready to stand trial. He administers sodium pentothal to get the unresponsive Barnaby talking. Barnaby, it turns out, has many secrets.

If this device seems contrived, it’s likely readers will forgive Vanderbes as she slowly and skillfully unravels the mystery of what caused Barnaby to snap, deepens Dr. Willard and Juliet’s friendship in the midst of war, and sets Juliet on her search for Tuck. Vanderbes’s prose is tight and her scenes of life in war-torn Italy seem well researched and authentic.

The war drags on. What seemed to the young men and women who enlisted like a noble cause now feels like a sentence in purgatory. Vanderbes writes unsparingly about senseless military regulations, the insanity that is war, and certain prejudices of the time, which, sadly, don’t seem to have fallen all that far out of fashion.

Vanderbes writes with great compassion about soldiers’ plights, battle fatigue (known in contemporary times as post-traumatic stress disorder), and what¾and who¾brought Barnaby to attempt to take his own life. Vanderbes maintains the suspense up until, and perhaps beyond, the ending of the book, not neatly tying up all loose ends, which might trouble some readers. Readers may also wonder about the epilogue set in 1947.

Done well are Vanderbes’ well-phrased insights about love, friendship, dedication, and the pointlessness of war. “Here they were, creatures of yet another brutal epoch,” Juliet realizes. “Even if they survived all of this, she knew history would swallow them, silently, as it did everyone.”