Jeane Slone

She Built Ships During World War II (Volume 1) Jeane Slone

What do the Port Chicago explosion, Tuskegee Airmen, Japanese American internment, and women welders have in common? She Built Ships During WWII weaves all these fascinating events into one fast-paced novel. This fiction immerses the reader into the era of the forties on the home front. Three diverse women experience gender and ethnic discrimination in a man?s world. When her husband ships off to the Navy, Lolly joins the first female work force as a welder. She enrolls her children in the first child care center in Richmond, California, and receives a dose of correct parenting. Her only friend, Sumi, a Japanese American, is a pregnant store owner who becoming interned in a horse stable at Tanforan. It is here that Sumi gives birth. At the shipyard, Lolly works with an illiterate Negro woman, Hattie, whose husband becomes missing in action in the Tuskegee Air Corps. Hattie?s brother is injured in the Port Chicago explosion. An affair with her welding instructor complicates Lolly?s life further. Historical details enrich this story as the reader shares the intense struggles and fleeting joys in these difficult times.