Leeway Cottage
Beth Gutcheon
(Reviewer - Coletta Ollerer)
2005 William Morrow
ISBN: 0060539054

Love, survival & the Danish Resistance during World War II.

Leeway Cottage is a summer place on the Maine coast at Dundee. Sydney Brant is a lonely young girl, surrounded by wealth. Her mother has fondness for things & position rather than her child. Her father's affection is precious but his alcoholism & death deal her a deep wound. Sidney finds comfort with her contemporaries who inhabit this vacation community, & that group is her stronghold all of her life, even after her foray to New York to become a singer, where she meets the love of her life, Laurus Moss, a Danish pianist.

Associate Reviewer Coletta Ollerer writes:

Leeway Cottage is the story of Sydney's marriage during a time of war. While she is pregnant with her first child in the early years of the conflict, Laurus feels he must join the war effort & leaves for England. The Nazis step up the persecution of Danish Jews & while he works for Danish underground in London, his brother Kaj & sister Nina join the struggle against the Nazi occupation at home. They know they must get their parents, their mother being a Jew, out of Denmark to Sweden. Creatures of habit, the parents are unwilling to leave home, scoffing at the Nazi threat. Finally they agree to go. “They wished they had listened to the children the night before. Frightened and chastened, they are listening now.” (p182)

Back in the States, Sydney's life is far removed from stressful Denmark. She enjoys her daughter's company as she deals with food ration stamps & other inconveniences of war, as experienced by wealthy Americans.

Laurus' parents arrive safely in Sweden. Nina is captured by the Nazis & sent first to a camp in Denmark, later to be transported to Ravensbruck in Germany. Her life there is a tableau of horror from which she never really recovers.

At war's end, Laurus returns, Sydney is ecstatic. They resume their marriage & have two more children. “...somewhere during the war years, when his attention was elsewhere, her dish of weights had gotten so full of ‘must’ and ‘should’ and ‘want to’ and ‘can't’ and ‘won't’, that it has plunged toward the ground, leaving Laurus' light and amiable dish of ‘can’, and ‘have’, and ‘why not’, swinging in the breeze.” (p263) Their different temperaments become apparent. Friends wonder why Laurus stays with Sydney. His explanation of the Danish character seems to give the answer. “Danes love peace. And they love comfort, and they'll sacrifice a lot for them. But they cannot enjoy peace and comfort while behaving badly... They trust each other to behave... They act (respectfully) out of simple pride.’” (p276)

Laurus' family of origin, now reunited, visit at Leeway Cottage. Aunt Nina accompanies them but the children are uncomfortable around her, ‘...she was so touchy and reserved and they knew their mother thought she was basically a pain in the ass.’ (p233) Nina & Sydney's lives are too disparate to allow for any empathy.

Beth Gutcheon implies throughout Leeway Cottage that Sydney is spoiled & self-indulgent, but perhaps she's just a person frantically searching for someone to love her, while being incapable of loving her own self, due to an “affection-deprived” childhood. Either way, this study of a mid-twentieth century marriage is worth the read. The research of the Nazi invasion of Denmark, the Resistance movement there, & its survivors is an added bonus to a remarkable saga of life on both sides of the Atlantic during & after WWII.

More from Beth Gutcheon:
More Than You Know
Domestic Pleasures
Still Missing
& more.
(06/05/05)

Coletta
2005©Coletta Ollerer
A RebeccasReads.Com Associate Reviewer

Reviewer's Bio:
I have always enjoyed writing. As a teenager I submitted to magazines like Seventeen, & was politely rejected. As a young mother, I had several poems published in The Chicago Tribune. Born in Chicago in 1932, I still live in the area. Since I retired, I have had some success on the Internet with my book reviews, stories & poetry. I enjoy historical fiction mostly, but will read anything uplifting, informative & fun. When I'm not reading & writing, I'm making jewelry, sewing needlepoint, & painting.