The Stolen Marriage

The Stolen Marriage by Diane Chamberlain

     Tess DeMello’s life was all planned out.  She was going to marry her childhood sweetheart, become a nurse, assist her newly minted doctor husband and live in Brooklyn close to their parents, who live next door to each other.  Her wedding date is set,  she is shopping for a dress.  But then Vincent, her fiancé, takes a temporary position in Chicago studying the polio epidemic and he is gone a long time longer than the two weeks he promised.  It’s time to pout a little and so Tess goes on a weekend jaunt with her best friend, Gina.  Things don’t go well.

     Tess, pregnant and single in 1944, knows she has messed up and has to fix things fast.  She leaves a goodbye note for Vincent, travels to Hickory, North Carolina, where Henry Kraft, the father of her coming baby lives, looking to him for financial help but he suggests they marry.  She agrees.  She knows she has to. But the small town gossip is convinced she trapped the catch of the town and she is alone and ignored.

     As Tess works through a belittling mother-in-law, a snarky sister-in-law and a town populace that refuses to accept her, a husband who won’t touch her and who works all hours of the day and night, Tess’s entrapment is hard to take. 

     A polio epidemic comes to Hickory and within 54 hours the town builds a hospital.  Tess insists on using her skills as a nurse and it is through the avenue things start to look up.

     But don’t get cocky with yourself and think you know how this story is going to work out.  You could be wrong. I was.