Skye Lewis Books

On Saturday, they were out for a day of skiing, shopping, working, and playing; on Sunday, Pearl Harbor was attacked; on Monday war was declared, and the Macdonald family’s ordinary lives are upended. Donald ＂Mac＂ Macdonald, a talented engineer for Stone and Webster in Boston, is placed in the middle of the Manhattan Project. Bertha, wife and mother of their two boys, manages air raids, blackouts, rationing, her mother’s declining health, and a victory garden to keep the family fed. Their eldest, Sonny, an avid skier and college freshman, has no doubts that he will be drafted, gathers the necessary recommendations for the new mountaineering and ski corps, the 10th Mountain Division. Youngest son Ig is looking forward to his high school years.

As the war progresses, Mac is rarely home and when he is, security personnel are stationed outside the home. Bertha struggles to handle the constant security around Mac and their home along with the expectations and responsibilities of wives and mothers on the home front. Sonny spends 18 months training in the snow and cold of the Colorado mountains, learns to handle mules and ford rivers in the heat of Texas, and enters some of the toughest battles of the war in the Apennine Mountains of Italy. Ig’s role as a 15-year-old messenger in the Manhattan Project’s Boston office provides him with knowledge his family will never know as secrets and security put a barrier between family members. By war’s end, this close-knit family has been altered forever.