{ "item_title" : "The Half Life", "item_author" : [" Rachel Beanland "], "item_description" : "From the author of Florence Adler Swims Forever and The House Is on Fire, a novel set on a remote Italian island about a navy wife's reckoning with power, love, and the price of staying silent in the Atomic Age. A captivating, whip-smart novel about love, loyalty, and a woman torn between two lives. I utterly adored it. --Clare Leslie Hall, New York Times bestselling author of Broken Country When twenty-three-year-old Eileen O'Malley meets charismatic naval officer Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn't expect to fall so hard, so fast. But Paul is funny and ambitious, and soon, Eileen's got a ring on her finger and is following him to the tiny, sun-drenched Mediterranean island of La Maddalena, where Paul will be heading up Radiological Controls aboard a submarine tender. In La Maddalena, Eileen joins a makeshift community of navy wives who are hell-bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, and as she settles into life on the island--taking Italian lessons and learning to make culurgiones--she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from. Still, it doesn't take long for Eileen to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. The decision to send nuclear-powered subs into the La Maddalena Archipelago was a contentious one, and the U.S. government is doing whatever it can to ensure that the island--not to mention all of Italy--doesn't go communist in the next election. When Italian activists and scientists begin to sound the alarm about possible nuclear contamination in the water, the island erupts in a series of protests, made worse by the ongoing mishaps of the U.S. Navy. Soon, Eileen's marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets--and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she's been handed. Atmospheric, sexy, and quietly defiant, The Half Life is a story of love, complicity, and awakening--of one woman forced to choose between loyalty to her husband and country and to the Italian locals who show her the high cost of American exceptionalism.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/66/806/913/166806913X_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "26.40", "our_price" : "26.40", "club_price" : "26.40", "savings_pct" : "12", "savings_amt" : "3.60", "club_savings_pct" : "12", "club_savings_amt" : "3.60", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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Rachel Beanland’s The Half Life has a little bit of everything melded together with page-turning ease. Beanland has already proven herself adept at historical fiction with Florence Adler Swims Forever and The House Is on Fire. Her third novel is set in the early 1970s, narrated by 23-year-old Eileen O’Malley, who meets naval officer Paul Archer and quickly falls in love and marries him. Suddenly, she finds herself whisked away from her Charleston, South Carolina, home and living on the island of La Maddalena, Italy, where Paul is stationed aboard a submarine tender, a boat servicing submarines. “Jesus, Paul . . . this can’t be real,” Eileen exclaims as she catches sight of the seemingly idyllic island for the first time. Some call it the “Rock,” she learns, like Alcatraz—“But with better beaches. . . . And much better food.” That comparison proves to be particularly apt, for Eileen’s new home is heavenly but isolating. Eileen’s older brother Lenny’s recent death in the Vietnam War dramatically affects Eileen’s outlook as a naval officer’s wife. While Paul is absorbed in his demanding career, Eileen has plenty of time for herself. She explores the island, tries to befriend other naval wives and takes Italian lessons from a nurturing political activist, Francesca. She also finds herself attracted to Francesca’s nephew, Teo, a journalist reporting on possible nuclear contamination in the water—and thus with interests directly counter to Paul’s. Locals, meanwhile, stage protests demanding transparency about radiation testing, which Paul is in charge of. Beanland does a particularly good job of portraying the lives of naval families and the myriad political forces at play on La Maddalena at the time, perhaps because of her own personal experience. Her father was a U.S. Naval Officer assigned to a submarine tender from 1986-1988, and Beanland lived on the island with her family during kindergarten and first grade. To write this novel, she drew on her own memories and those of her family in addition to historical events. The Half Life is a cleverly named novel, readers eventually discover, with a particularly satisfying epilogue offering several surprises. The Half Life seems destined to resonate with a legion of readers, both on a political and personal level—similar, in several significant ways, to Kristin Hannah’s The Women. As Francesca advises Eileen, “When we were forced to fight for things, we figured out what mattered.”