Bobbie Ann Mason brings WWII alive in 'Blue Beret'

By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY

Bobbie Ann Mason knows her way around a good story. She has proven that over and over ? in In Country,Nancy Culpepper and her memoir Clear Springs.

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Now the PEN/Hemingway Award winner returns with a novel that takes us back to World War II, the Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, and the men and women who played out the drama on the world stage. One man in particular.

The novel is based on Mason's father-in-law, Marshall Stone, and his real-life experiences as a gallant, daredevil flyboy who made nine bombing raids over Europe until the fateful day he is brought down, crashing his B-17 into a Belgian farmer's field.

Decades later Stone is forced into retirement ? he flew jumbo jets ? and doesn't know what to do with his life until one day he decides to return to that Belgian field, retracing his war steps. His goal? To reconnect with the Resistance people who helped him survive, especially one young woman, a teenager during the war, who guided him through the back streets of Paris. Yes, the girl in the blue beret.

This is a war story told decades later, helped along by Mason's extensive research in Europe, where she tracked down the real-life heroes herself. Ushering her readers back and forth across the decades, she perfectly weaves history with fiction.

Without giving anything away, let's just say Stone discovers nothing short of amazing revelations about the people who helped him all those years ago, people who risked their lives for him. And along the way Stone discovers a few things about himself.

The Girl in the Blue Beret
By Bobbie Ann Mason
Random House
345 pp., $26
* * * out of four

In many ways the book is a tribute to these unsung civilians whose heroism often was never acknowledged by those they helped.

As for the girl in the blue beret, he discovers her living near Cognac. A widow. She recognizes him immediately and tells him her family took in other aviateurs during the occupation.

"'You remembered me as the girl in the blue beret. ? Is it not so?'" she said. "'But our signals varied. Sometimes I wore a Scottish scarf. One of the aviateurs wrote me and he remembered me as the girl in the red socks!'

"He (Stone) laughed. "'The girl in the red socks. It doesn't have the same ring to it.'"

Indeed it does not. To him she remained the girl in the blue beret, and a good thing, too. It's a perfect title for this near-perfect war story.

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