She Treads Softly: Hold Strong

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

Hold Strong

Hold Strong by Robert Dugoni, Jeff Langholz, Chris Crabtree
1/28/25; 555 pages
Lake Union Publishing

Hold Strong by Robert Dugoni, Jeff Langholz, and Chris Crabtree is a very highly recommended, exceptional historical WWII fiction based on real events from the Pacific theater. Hold Strong will certainly be one of the best books of 2025.

Sam Carlson and Sarah Haber are high school sweethearts from a small town in Minnisota. After high school Sam goes off to join the National Guard while Sarah, an excellent student who excels at math, has a scholarship to attend college and plans to be a teacher. Sam's unit suddenly becomes active and become part of the army as a tank unit. After the Japanese bomb of Pearl Harbor, Sam is sent to the Philippines and subsequently captured as a POW. He is one of the few survivors from the Bataan Death March, endures brutal horrors at a POW camp and, as one of 1,800, ends up on the notorious Japanese Hell Ship, the Arisan Maru.

Sarah went on to earn her masters degree and decided to accept an offer to go to Washington, DC, and work on code breaking. Sarah's natural skills allow her to quickly move up the ranks and become one of the few women to work at an secret, classified facility breaking codes from the Japanese.

What makes this an exceptional novel is the absolutely outstanding quality of the writing and the fact that it is based on real historical events. The amount of research that went into this novel is commendable. Included at the end are a comprehensive Afterword, Bibliography and End Notes.

Chapters which follow the atrocities Sam survives contrasts with those following Sarah's work as one of the first WAVES. Both are working for their country, using their abilities the best they can and based on real people. Their devotion for each other is inspiring. However, Sam's storyline is the most impactful and unforgettable because of the sadistic, vicious treatment he and others endured. His survival against insurmountable odds never seemed to be guaranteed.

The cruel, barbaric horrors that the POWs endured at the hands of the Japanese in WWII is fully covered here for those who never learned about the war crimes that occurred in the Pacific theater. The Bataan Death March should be a known fact by everyone. The conditions and treatment of the prisoners at the Japanese POW camps was brutal and inhumane. Over 21,000 POWs were killed on the Japanese hellships.

Hold Strong truly is an epic novel that is based on the most shocking war crimes of World War II. Thanks toLake Union Publishing for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.