Gather Beachmont Letters Prepared By Cathleen Twomey Shown As Textbook

Operation Dear Abby, kindly English teachers invited their students to write to soldiers serving in WWII, never dreaming of the heartache they might cause when their female students fell for the lonely, frightened and traumatized men they befriended through airmail.
Sensitive and lovely Eleanor, recuperating physically and emotionally from a restaurant fire that left her face and upper body permanently scarred and took her father from the family, finds it is easy to relate to a stranger on paper, and Robert, the soldier she is assigned, falls for her humor and honesty and the picture she sends him that is two years old.


In between shifts at the local drugstore, Eleanor lives for her letters from Robert, telling him the things she can't say to her mother or seven year old sister or nosy neighbor or coworkers, about how hard it

is to be her, and how much she missed her physician father, without revealing the details of her disfigurement.
In fact, the reader only gets those details as Eleanor herself comes to terms with her accident, a deft storytelling trick by the author,

Twomey sensitively captures this historical portrait of a girl on the brink of womanhood in a challenging time local details give this story set in Revere special appeal for Massachusetts readers.
A tearjerker coming of age story with a solid plot and strong character, I read this several years ago, but found myself thinking of it this morning, It's an amazing story about accepting and loving yourself and, more importantly, accepting that others can accept and love you even if you don't fit society's definition of perfect beauty.
A powerful story that I think of often,
Nice little story. Oddly, this both looks and reads like it was written a decade earlier despite being set in thes, where it evokes the period very well, but that's a good thing.
I beautiful YA book that takes place on the homefront during WWII, Just a sweet read. This book makes you think a lot about being in other people's shoes, so to speak, I appreciated the realistic view, although some more closure would have been nice, I loved the characters each individual and well done,
A Eleanor Driscoll, a seventeenyearold girl, has been horribly burned in a restaurant fire that took the lives of more than four hundred people, including her father, Many people turn away from her face others make cruel comments, But there are a few special people who look beyond the scars and see the real Eleanor, She has a hard time accepting their friendship,

The only person in the world she feels comfortable with is someone she has never met, someone who knows nothing about the scars on her face: Robert Bettencourt.
Writing to Robert began as an assignment from her English teacher, "Write to a soldier," Sister Agnes said, It is World War II, Fate assigns her to Robert, who thinks she is warm and bright and funny, But she is afraid to trust him with the truth,

Eleanor eventually discovers that the fire may have destroyed her face and body, but it can not destroy the person she is inside, .