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    GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love
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    GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love
    Unavailable
    GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love
    Ebook437 pages6 hours

    GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love

    By Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    For readers enchanted by the bestsellers The Astronaut Wives Club, The Girls of Atomic City, and Summer at Tiffany’s, an absorbing tale of romance and resilience—the true story of four British women who crossed the Atlantic for love, coming to America at the end of World War II to make a new life with the American servicemen they married.

    The “friendly invasion” of Britain by over a million American G.I.s bewitched a generation of young women deprived of male company during the Second World War. With their exotic accents, smart uniforms, and aura of Hollywood glamour, the G.I.s easily conquered their hearts, leaving British boys fighting abroad green with envy. But for girls like Sylvia, Margaret, Gwendolyn, and even the skeptical Rae, American soldiers offered something even more tantalizing than chocolate, chewing gum, and nylon stockings: an escape route from Blitz-ravaged Britain, an opportunity for a new life in affluent, modern America.

    Through the stories of these four women, G.I. Brides illuminates the experiences of war brides who found themselves in a foreign culture thousands of miles away from family and friends, with men they hardly knew. Some struggled with the isolation of life in rural America, or found their soldier less than heroic in civilian life. But most persevered, determined to turn their wartime romance into a lifelong love affair, and prove to those back home that a Hollywood ending of their own was possible.

    G.I. Brides includes an eight-pages insert that features 45-black-and-white photos.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 2, 2014
    ISBN9780062328069
    Author

    Duncan Barrett

    Duncan Barrett & Nuala Calvi are the bestselling authors of GI Brides and The Sugar Girls. Duncan studied English at Cambridge and now works as a writer and editor, specializing in biography and memoir. Nuala is a writer and journalist. She trained at London College of Printing and has written for The Times, The Independent, the BBC, CNN, and numerous Time Out books. They both live in London.

    Read more from Duncan Barrett

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    Reviews for GI Brides

    4/5

    11 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I received this as a Goodreads giveaway so mine didn't have the photos that some people have talked about. I would love to see photos of these brave women who took a chance on the love they found with the U.S. GI's who they barely knew. When the U.S. soldiers were sent to England, England had already been in the war for two years and many of their young men were gone fighting. This left a lot of women to pick up the slack back home and left them time with the GI's who gave them gifts of goodies they hadn't seen in quite some time. A lot of these women went back to America to a life they never imagined. Some good but a lot not so good. This book is written by a granddaughter of one of the women featured. I am fascinated with everything to do with WWII and this is yet another side I didn't really know much about. I knew a lot of British women married and moved to America but I didn't know much about their lives. This book is so beautifully written and makes you fall in love with these women. Some of them I was saddened to see what their husbands became and others I was so happy they ended up with a good guy. I recommend this book if you want to know a little bit about what happened during WWII. I wanted to read the book instead of work. It was hard to go back to work after my lunch hour was over.
    • 4/5
      From the very beginning of the book, I felt that the third person narrative imposed a distance between me and the women in the stories. This got better as I went and got more engaged in the stories. In particular, the pictures in the middle and the conclusion both made me feel more connected to the women because they really brought home the fact that these were true stories.  There were also some very moving scenes throughout as all the women overcame incredible odds. Their stories would be fantastic fiction but are as true stories, they're also awe inspiring. I loved learning about this fascinating little piece of history that I'd never heard of before.

      Given the subject matter and the time period, it was inevitable this book would focus largely on the four women's relationships with their husbands and other suitors. At times, this made it a little difficult to remember who was who, but the authors did a very good job reorienting the reader as they switched between stories. Despite the focus on the women's relationships (both in the book and in that time period), they all managed to stand on their own and fight for what they wanted out of life. I think it's wonderful that the authors are telling the stories of these inspiring women, one of whom is author Nuala Calvi's grandmother. The fact that the author's did many interviews and a lot of research is clear from the richness of these stories. If you love learning about women in history or WWII or if you like stories about complicated romance, this is definitely a book for you.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.
    • 4/5
      Really interesting stories of several women who married soldiers in England during WW2 and then followed them home to the U.S. Some marriages worked, others didn't -- This book gives us a peek into the thoughts and feelings that made the difference. Also, it is eye-opening to see American culture from another's point of view. I didn't realize that England and America were so different. Heart-warming and engaging.
    • 5/5
      GI Bride tells the life and loves of four young girls who fall in love with and marry four G.I.'s, set during World War II and after. I was surprised to learn how difficult it was for American G.I.'s to marry a woman from Britain and the European Union, but so many did even though the diversity. I found fascinating the stories the authors told of the women's trouble getting to America and how they became accustom to a new life in the USA. A true story which I didn't realize until the end. I enjoyed this book because it was entertaining and informative and shows life is not all like a romantic movie.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of four English women who married GI soldiers during WWII. In a time when London was teeming with American soldiers, many girls found themselves swept off of their feet. When the war was over, they had to make the difficult choice to leave behind their homeland and join their husbands in America. This was a pretty interesting story. The woman showed true courage and determination to make their lives succeed. Although it was slow at times, I found the culture clash interesting. Overall, well worth picking up.
    • 4/5
      GI Brides explores the lives of four British women who marry American soldiers during World War II. They fall in love with a military soldier, marry, and emigrate to the United States with their military husbands. While each woman married for love, they mostly struggled with their new life in the United States. What followed was mostly disappointment and sadness. This was a rather depressing read overall, but I was glad I read it. I'm sure it was an extremely difficult time. I liked the content, but the writing was poor. I won this through a LibraryThing giveaway! Thank you!
    • 3/5
      Oh my, what a book. What started out as a fascinating look into the lives of young girls (and their heartthrob uniformed soldier boys) in the war turned into a soap-opera-like slog of domestic abuse and end up an essay in "why I'm glad I didn't live back during World War II". OMG these poor women provide a glimpse of the dreary life of women who basically sacrificed their lives for abusive men and had no societal means of support and don't feel they could leave... "we're British, we lived through the Blitz, we can survive anything". They fell for each other with wartime quickness and turned into a line of marriages that were - miserable, often war-like, survival stories. And the poor men - they got no support for PTSD and, at that time, probably couldn't even have admitted to PTSD even if there was therapy for it. A exploration of the 20th century's binary sex roles, trapped in their roles, living out mostly miserable lives and sticking out anything. I do recommend this book - if nothing else, just for the different view it gives of the war from all the soldier's books. Rarely do we get to read books from the civilian, and in particular, women's views. It's just that was started out as war stories turned into such misery that it was just too much. And that's what I'd have to say about the whole book: too much detail. And the kicker was, at the end of the book, the final summaries sounded like they were talking about a different book... "generally happy"?... "love of her life"?... "surrounded by love and family"? Oh man, it's no wonder we are a messed up generation in part because our families came from this mess.Recommend only if you can remain calm with descriptions of domestic abuse.
    • 5/5
      When America entered WW 2, many soldiers were sent to England as a staging ground for attacks on the continent. With many British men already fighting in Europe (or wounded or dead), the influx of relatively well paid young GIs found a country full of young women willing to date them. With the threat of battle immanent, both men and women grabbed at happiness and married without knowing each other well at all. When the war ended and the GIs were sent home, their young brides went with them- on separate ships, of course, and with a lot of indignities. What they found when the arrived on US shores wasn’t what they’d expected. Calvi’s grandmother was one of these GI brides, and she learned Margaret’s story not long before her grandmother’s death. This led to looking into the lives of other war brides. Four of them; Rae, Margaret, Sylvia and Gwendolyn (Lyn) have their stories shared with us here. One found herself married to an alcoholic who spent every penny he made (and then some) on alcohol, finally becoming abusive. Another married a compulsive gambler with PTSD. One’s family didn’t take to her at first at all and seemed to deliberately make her life miserable, and she contracted polio on top of that. Another’s husband was womanizer. They all had culture shock and found that even the English language wasn’t the same in the US as it was in England. The image of America that many had was of relative wealth, and it wasn’t always so. Not all the GI brides had horrible marriages; even after rocky starts, some remained happily married for a lifetime. But they all had to be incredibly strong to survive what they did. Some of them were only teenagers when they married and left their homes. I loved this book. Social history is fascinating to me, and I’m glad these stories are being told before that generation dies off. Each chapter is about a different one of the four, going in rounds. I confess that I sometimes had a little trouble with that format; I’d forget what the one I was reading had done in her last couple of chapters. I managed, though; it’s not hard to flip back and take a look.
    • 3/5
      GI Brides is not the type of non-fiction I tend to gravitate to. It has no footnotes, no true bibliography, no index. Instead, the author rely on details stories of four women who married American GIs and returned with them to the US after World War II. It smacks more of the tabloid press than of history.That said, sometimes lightweight, dish-y stories (true or not) are just what the doctor ordered. I admit the stories were compelling, if somewhat predictable. Here they are, young women who fall in love with men whose backstories they do not know. In fact, they only know the men they marry in one context – that of war. And they don’t know their future in-laws, which turns out to be a key, in many cases, to whether the marriage survives or not.I wish I would have known that one of the authors was the grand-daughter of one of the four featured women. That didn’t come out until I read the readers’ guide at the end of the book. Overall, GI Brides is a great non-fiction book for people who don’t like non-fiction. While reading it, it’s easy to forget that it isn’t a novel. This was a book I “won” in the Early Reviewers’ lottery in June but never received a copy of. I got tired of waiting and checked out the book from my public library.
    • 3/5
      When you think of the quick marriages that happen in wartime, you probably think of the marriages that took place before a soldier shipped out, marriages between people who already had a relationship and speeded it up to suit the short time frame they had. But in actual fact, there were many WWII marriages that were slightly different than this, if no less quick. Those very different wartime marriages were the ones between American soldiers and young British women they met when they were sent to England for training before heading to the European theater. Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi follow four of these GI brides into their marriages and their lives afterwards in their new book, GI Brides: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love. Alternating chapters between Sylvia, Gwendolyn (Lyn), Rae, and Margaret, the book follows the four women more or less chronologically as they each join the war effort in their own way, as they meet and are courted by American soldiers, as they make the decision to marry, and then as they leave Britain after the war to follow their husbands to their new homes across an ocean. Each of the women marries for reasons as unique as she is, from falling in love to an accidental pregnancy. What they all have in common though, is how little they actually know the men whom they marry and the loneliness of moving thousands of miles from friends and family. Barrett and Calvi do a good job showing the road blocks the women faced from just getting permission to marry, to finding transport to America, to the suspicions they faced once in the US, to the hardships of adjusting to marriage with a relative stranger. And they contrast the idea of America as a land of prosperity and plenty with the hard and unhappy adjustment these very young women have to make when expectations hit a wall of not always pleasant reality. One of the brides endures abuse, one is viewed with suspicion and unkindness by her husband's family members, one discovers that her husband is an alcoholic, one contracts polio, one's husband is an unrepentant womanizer. What had looked like happier pairings in the days of war when everyone was grabbing at whatever happiness they could find turned into rocky marriages and generally difficult and lonely lives as expats for the four women. The women's stories are told in third person omniscient, an odd choice for a non-fiction work as it reads more like fiction. And although the stories are the result of interviews and oral histories, that narrative perspective causes the reader to wonder how much of it is straight truth and how much embellished. The narrative structure flipping from one woman to another each chapter does make it difficult to keep each woman's life separate and her experiences firmly within her story. Just as the brides blur together, so do the husbands. And although these are just four of the thousands of women who came over to this country as war brides, they are a sad cross-sampling given how most of their marriages turned out. Over all, the book is an interesting one and it showed another side of the results of WWII but it doesn't feel as representative of all GI Brides as it might have had there been a bit more variation.
    • 4/5
      The subtitle of GI Brides by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi is: The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love. Over one million American GI's 'invaded' England during the Second World War . And by the end of the war, over 70,000 women had married American servicemen and headed to the United States to start a new chapter in their lives. Barrett and Calvi's book documents the lives of four of these women - Sylvia, Gwendolyn, Rae and Margaret, from the early days of the war, to meeting their husbands and finally their experiences over the pond. The narrative rotates through each woman's story in alternating chapters. It's absolutely fascinating reading and I was hard pressed to put it down. The time period is explored and relived through each woman's memories. Historical references are made to actual events and attitudes of the time, but the focus of GI Brides is personal and intimate. Although falling in love with a dashing young military man and crossing the ocean to a new country had the feeling of a romantic fairy tale, what these women actually experienced was not. Now, this was not necessarily the case for all GI Brides. The authors do mention that they "needed stories that really stood out - where the women had faced adversity and grown as a result." There are over forty pictures included in the book, that I found myself looking at almost every time I finished a chapter - gazing at a black and white photo of years gone by and contemplating the direction their lives took. I am captured by memoirs - even more so in this case. These women persevered and soldiered on - "We're British, we can stand anything. Those simple words brought great solace and support to a group of women building lives far from family and home." It was only while reading the authors' notes at the end of the book that I discovered that Nuala Calvi is the granddaughter of Margaret, lending a very personal note to the book. GI Brides reads almost like fiction - anyone enjoying this time period and a look at real lives lived would absolutely enjoy this book
    • 3/5
      I got this book as a 99-cent Kindle special, and this book was definitely worth more than its purchase price. It's the story of four British women who married American GI's and came to the States as war brides. This is no fairy tale story of love blooming ass the bombs fall & then a happy ever afterwards in the golden land of America. Instead we see how very young girls fell for the romance of not only American GI's, but also the myth of America and how brutal the reality was for many of them.All four of the women portrayed in this book struggle with their marriages after the war and only one has a marriage that ends up being truly happy. However, they all make their way in the world one way or another and you en up admiring their bravery and resourcefulness in making lives for themselves in a strange new land. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      Four English girls meet GIs during WWII, only to come to the U.S. as War Brides. Alternating biographical sketches on each, one of whom is Author Nuala Calvi's grandmother. While Margaret, Sylvia, Rae and Lyn never crossed paths, they share a common sense of romantic adventure, crushing homesickness, and bravery and determination in the face of adversity. says one, "I'll be all right. After all, I lived through the Blitz. We're British. We can stand anything." Note: The publisher never got us the copies through the LT ER program,but I was able to find a sale copy through B&N Nook.
    • 3/5
      I absolutely loved reading about each of the GI Brides featured in this book. Barrett and Calvi are such amazing authors that I felt that I was immediately transported back into the 1940s and watching the love stories unfold. This is a book that I would definitely want to re-read this book! It would actually make for a really good television series.