A Word Award winner.It’s 1939, and Canada is on the cusp of entering World War II. Seventeen-year-old farm girl Cornelia has been heartbroken since the day her mother died five years ago. As a new tragedy provides Cornelia still more reason to reject her parent’s faith, a mysterious visitor appears in her hour of desperation. Alone and carrying a heavy secret, she makes a desperate choice that … desperate choice that will haunt her for years to come. Never telling a soul, Cornelia pours out the painful events of the war in her diary.
Many decades later, Cornelia’s granddaughter, Benita, is in the midst of her own crisis, experiencing several losses in the same week, including the grandmother she adored. The resulting emotional and financial stress takes its toll on her and her husband, Ken, who is unemployed. On the brink of divorce, she discovers Cornelia’s diary. Now the secrets of her grandmother’s past will lead Benita on an unexpected journey of healing, reunion, and faith.
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I could not stop reading. This story line was unique. The. Addition of finding the diary was an interesting twist. The characters and their reactions were very believable.
Stories with old diaries, letters and mementos enchant me and this book did just that. Set in Canada, The Silver Suitcase opens with the scene of a young woman and her grandmother and the close relationship between them. After her grandmother passes, the granddaughter finds and begins reading her grandmother’s diaries that begin when her grandmother was a teenager in the 1930s. The chapters toggle between the grandmother’s diary years and the granddaughter in present day, and the way in which the family was enriched through the diary. I wonder how many diaries have been left unread and discarded, with lost opportunities of touching another’s life.
I loved the cadence of the story, the realism of regular life and the epilogue.