Given the fractured state of today’s world and America’s ongoing involvement in militarized zones throughout many regions, it should come as no surprise that war-related fiction has seen an uptick in popularity over the past few decades. But while recent heavy hitters like REDEPLOYMENT, Phil Klay’s 2014 National Book Award-winning collection of short stories, Kevin Powers’ 2012 National Book Award Finalist YELLOW BIRDS, or Ben Fountain’s 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK provide valuable insight into the ravages of battle from a soldier’s perspective, fewer novels shift the focus to war’s impact on loved ones back home.

That’s where Emily Gray Tedrowe’s BLUE STARS comes in. Though it touches briefly on the courage it takes to serve one’s country, the tight-knit camaraderie between soldiers during wartime, and the PTSD that often accompanies a debilitating injury, Tedrowe’s novel is more concerned with the question of how legions of mothers and daughters manage while their sons and husbands are away.

The answer, of course, is not so well --- and Tedrowe wisely illustrates this point by comparing the strategies of two women, neither of whom have any inkling of how difficult the coping process might turn out to be. In one thread, there’s 55-year-old Ellen, a buttoned-up professor of literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison and widely published Edith Wharton scholar. Like any privileged, ultra-educated type, she’s a bit out of touch with just how harsh reality can get. Though she lost her husband early on from a sudden aneurysm, Ellen’s daily routine of teaching undergrads and raising her three children --- two biological and one she adopted when she was nearly 50 --- is nothing but comfortable, save the occasional skirmishes with her 19-year-old bohemian daughter, Jane. But when 21-year-old Mike, who became Ellen’s legal ward when he was 16, willingly enlists in the Marines and is shipped off to Iraq, Ellen’s carefully structured, liberal-leaning world is shaken from its foundation.

"Though it touches briefly on the courage it takes to serve one’s country, the tight-knit camaraderie between soldiers during wartime, and the PTSD that often accompanies a debilitating injury, Tedrowe’s novel is more concerned with the question of how legions of mothers and daughters manage while their sons and husbands are away."

Then there’s blonde bombshell Lacey Reed Diaz from the Bronx. She has plenty of clients as a personal trainer at the neighborhood gym, a collection of proud military wives she calls close girlfriends, and she’s finally found a man who can be a father to her 12-year-old son. That her new husband, Eddie --- a major in the Army reserves, heading back to Iraq --- often reprimands her for being too frisky or drinking one too many beers is something she thinks she can swallow, especially given her past experiences with abusive boyfriends. “I mean, who wouldn’t take it, the last-ditch chance to pull together, to go from being the last girl at last call to someone who knew her Sunnis from Shiites and why they were all screwed? … Lacey saw it as her ticket out, maybe the last one she’d be offered.”

Despite the revealing setup, nothing extraordinary happens during the first half of the book. Ellen and Lacey’s respective dramas independently unfold in alternating chapters, and other than the women’s gradual unraveling --- for Ellen, too many hours spent crafting and revising longwinded letters to Mike while bickering with an even feistier, newly pregnant Jane; for Lacey, mounting bills she can’t pay and a dangerously tempting flirtation with an old acquaintance from high school --- the writing seems fairly predictable and thin. It’s almost as if war and its consequences decided to take second fiddle to more familiar, digestible themes --- teenage pregnancy, guilt, family strife, infidelity.

But then something crucial transpires at the onset of Part Two, lending the novel its much-needed heft and significance: Tedrowe brings Ellen and Lacey together, as so often happens in life, under the most unfortunate of circumstances. Mike and Eddie are gravely injured in Iraq and sent to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C. to recover. Mike’s leg needs to be amputated above the knee, and Eddie loses an eye and most of his brain function. As the two men slowly begin to heal, Ellen and Lacey learn to depend on each other for comfort and support. The unlikeliest of friends, these strong women help each other do what’s nearly impossible given the circumstances: endure.

According to the Acknowledgements, Tedrowe was inspired to write BLUE STARS after reading a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles Dana Priest and Anne Hull wrote for the Washington Post in 2007 about the horrid living conditions at Walter Reed. She also pays tribute to her military lineage. “I want to acknowledge the many dear members of my extended family who have or are currently serving in the Armed Forces, and especially to the women in our family who know well what it is like to be the wife, mother, grandmother, or sibling of a service member at war,” she writes. Perhaps it’s this first-hand experience, in the end, that makes Tedrowe such an impassioned storyteller --- and Ellen and Lacey’s arduous but ultimately rewarding journey so worth sharing.