A FIRM PERSUASION

The author has written a true to life story of a young woman, Marlene Bryson, who experiences post-partum depression while her newly married husband is overseas during the war. Added to her sorrow is the fact that her baby, Harry, is the result of rape. She must decide her next move if she is to hold onto her sanity while living against her will in the stately Chicago home of her In-laws, the O'Coins. Her ultimate decision brings her young life full circle as she creates a future without her baby in a city far away among total strangers.  Her painful efforts at self-fulfillment and a purposeful life result in marriage with Jonas Maxwell while her first love struggles after war with her loss of and his own pain of PTSD.  The reader meets up with a cast of characters who become the fabric of Marlene's colorful and sometimes drab existence during the 1940's before Pearl Harbor and the Berlin Airlift in 1948: Col. Charles Lindbergh and Chennault, Doolittle and Rickenbacker, her staunch allies, Dolly and Sonja, a DP from Lithuania, Lincoln Maxwell, her son and Phoebe Bagwell, a reporter in Chicago. Enter her changing world.  This is Anthony's first full length novel. He has drawn from life experiences in human services as a licensed social worker with a graduate degree in counseling psychology. His travels have taken him all over the country, but now he calls Central Massachusetts his home where he lives with his wife Barbara Judith and their array of household pets.