Why Joel loves this book
One owes it to the author’s generosity — who unrelentingly shares the most intimate details of his parents’ courtship and entry into a rocky, postwar marriage — to read this deeply compelling account with utter respect for the unavoidable invasion of privacy it represents. The narrative is so engaging and addictive, especially with the inclusion of letters written at the time — making this both an epistolary novel and documentary memoir — that the reader cannot resist the temptation to judge and convict the characters for their unavoidable human foibles. However, pursuing that approach does a great disservice to the author and is a major affront to the subjects themselves, for the moments described and the letters shared were never meant for public consumption or scrutiny. As I said, it is a generous act of grace from an author wishing to convey the complexity of life and its consequences for…
1 author picked Married Across the Color Line as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In the closing months of World War II, a Black American soldier from Detroit met a young French woman in liberated Paris. Their love would survive war—but not the forces that awaited them in peacetime.
Married Across the Color Line is the true story of P. Frank Freeman and Sophie Rousseau, whose marriage crossed not only national borders but also the racial, cultural, and political divisions of the postwar world. As they struggled to build a life together across France, Germany, and the United States, their family became entangled in military regulations, racial prejudice, immigration law, and the growing bureaucracy…
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