Karen Fisher-Alaniz "Breaking the Code: A Father's Secret, a Daughter's Journey, and the Question That Changed Everything"

Available on Amazon where you can check out their 'Look Inside' feature and on Barnes & Noble.

This review is part of the author's continuing blog tour with Women On Writing (WOW)

A perfect read over Veteran's Day Weekend. This review is part of the author's tour with Women on Writing (WOW). Read the author's interview on The Muffin and follow her blog tour. Visit the author's website and enter a raffle through Dec. 7th and a chance to win a double-signed copy of her book. Bookplates will be signed by both Karen and her 91 year old father. Visit Twitter at #breakingthecode to see more reviews and contest.

Author's father 1945

A truly heart endearing memoir of a daughter who sets out to unravel her fathers past when he was stationed in the Pacific during WWII. On his 81st birthday, her father placed two old notebooks on her lap, with more than 400 pages of letters he'd written home to his parents. What started out as a simple quest to transcribe these letters, became a healing process for both, as the author discovers her father was a Japanese code breaker,  a secret he has kept from his family over all the years. Father and daughter began a nine year journey of healing and reaffirming their relationship. The author watched as her father painfully tried to bring back memories, often in pieces, that she has put together. The chronology of the book does not necessarily reflect the chronology of how his memories came back, yet the story is whole on what transpired during the war and in later years.

"I always knew my father had been in war. But as a child it was of little importance to me. I had bicycles to ride, friends to play with, and trees to climb.

He would tell us stories about the war. He was in the Navy and stationed at Pearl Harbor a few years after it was bombed in 1941. He spent his days working in an office. On liberty he went to the movies  or exploring with friends. These were the stories he told, which were never terribly interesting."

The stories were boring to young children. They were safe stories that didn't hurt anyone and didn't require answering questions. The author and her sister were tired of hearing them. Only later would the discovery of her father's secret life, his heroism, and the stress that followed him all his years after his service time, come to light.

This book is not only a personal story for the author and her father, but a look at history during WWII, presented in a way that is easy to read and highly informative.

I loved the layout of the book, the old photographs, and naive illustrations, bring the flavor of the period to life. The author has a way with narration, and dialog, that keeps the reader involved.

Author Karen Fisher-Alaniz

Karen's Father Murray Fisher

Daughter and Father at a recent book signing.

( 3 photos from author's Amazon page)

Gerald Gillis "Shall Never See So Much"

"Shall Never See So Much" award winning novel by Gerald Gillis

 Gold Medal Military Writers Society of America

  Bronze Medal Readers Favorite

Gerald Gillis in front of the Little Shop Of Arts And Antiques in Old Town Lilburn last spring after his book signing.

George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, Why I Write: "All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

A lot of effort goes into writing a book, enormous amounts of time and energy. There are times of great excitement and moments of suffocating doubt. There is hope and promise and turn-the-page anticipation when creating something in the sweet glow of afternoon where nothing existed in the early calm of morning. There is also the opportunity to gauge the thickness of one's skin and the stoutness of one's heart if rejection comes knocking, at once marginalizing and discouraging, as if the very demon of Orwell's essay is laughing hysterically at the folly of such an undertaking.

I wrote my novel Shall Never See So Much to chronicle the affects of a divisive war upon a typical American family, and the deep strains it brought upon its members. I settled upon the cataclysmic year 1968 to provide a setting that I thought would be interesting and instructive. I chose a Marine brother and his anti-war sister through whom I would tell the story.

My story in Shall Never See So Much involves the bravery of my characters in their respective times of turmoil and danger. The point of my book is my belief that the human spirit is fundamentally heroic. I believe it because I've studied history. I believe it because I served in the Marine Corps with a great many heroes of the first order. I believe it because I've seen it in the lives of everyday people, like my grandmother and my parents. I still see it, in my wife and kids, and now I'm starting to see it in my grandkids. They're heroes to me, real heroes, and they inspire me by their example. Shall Never See So Much is about American heroes who took a stand and did their best in what they thought was right for the nation.

That's the story I wanted to tell, and the message I wanted to impart. That's why I write. That's where I find the real worth.

That's my purpose.

"Shall Never See So Much is an incredible story of family, war and the love of country that held our nation together."  By Military Writers Society of America

Shall Never See So Much has been awarded a Gold Medal by the Military Writers Society of America and a Bronze Medal by Readers Favorite, both for its historical fiction category.

Visit the author's website and blog. Buy the book on Amazon.