Book Review: Now Silence - A Novel of World War II by Tori Warner Shepard

Our experiences shape who we are. In the case of author Tori Warner Shepard, her early life laid out a path for her that could only be expressed properly in art and in writing. Having grown up in the tumult of World War II, she experienced the chaos through the confusion of the Pearl Harbor attacks and the unrelated loss of her father. With her mother remarried at the conclusion of the War, Shepard moved with her family to Japan as her stepfather oversaw the installation of Coca Cola bottling plants.

She was dejected and forlorn, ripped away from her family in a foreign land that had been ravaged by war. But life has a funny way of making our darkest experiences useful and Shepard’s early life has, indeed, proven to be useful.

With her latest, Now Silence: A Novel of World War II, Shepard utilizes her experiences of being uprooted to tell an engaging story of the women living during the War.

Couched in a mass of research and history, Shepard’s novel has a broad epic feel as it pours out across the pages. Her characters are rich and convincing, her prose is pleasantly vigorous, and the informative research behind the pages of fiction adds a dark and almost sinister element to the war.

Now Silence is, by and large, about two women: Phyllis and Anissa. Their stories form the centrepiece to the tale, granting a balancing point on which all of the other stories rotate.

Phyllis and Anissa have one thing in common: a man. Phyllis, redheaded bombshell that she is, is introduced as she loses Russell, a man whom she loves dearly. Russell is still married to Anissa, a crazed cult-obsessed nutbag dragging her feet on the divorce.

As Russell passes on in an accident, Phyllis undertakes a journey to confront Anissa and to give her Russell’s shotgun. The trip takes Phyllis through military land, where she meets and suitably greets a host of men in uniform. Meanwhile, Anissa is still as nutty as ever and her life in Santa Fe with the fiery LaBelle is filled with attempts at bringing new converts to her strange religion. LaBelle, meanwhile, awaits news from Melo, who is in a camp outside of Nagasaki.

Article Author: Jordan Richardson

Jordan Richardson is a Canadian freelance writer and ne'er-do-well. He writes stuff here and here.

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