Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Fiction 2023 | 256 pages

Speaking of falling in love with an author (seeing my last blog post!) I have also fallen in love with Shelley Blanton-Stroud, author of Copy Boy, Tomboy, and Poster Girl. 

Our hero, Jane Benjamin, has worked her way up to be gossip columnist for The Prospect, a San Francisco-based newspaper, in 1942.  But, as in her first two novels, Benjamin finds herself in the middle of real stories, not the stuff gossip is made of.  Covering seven days in November 1942, the novel opens with Jane attending a celebration for the first women welders hired and trained by Lowe Shipyards, a west coast shipbuilder, who is a leader among the shipbuilders in the competitive shipbuilding market as the United States enters WWII.  But one of the four new welders is missing from the celebration, and we soon find her dead, apparently from a faulty welding cable.  Jane is thrown into the mystery of her death, which is handled and investigated totally by internal Rowe employees, as well as the political and cultural struggle to bring women into patriotic, economic, and physical support of the war.

As with her first two novels in the Jane Benjamin series, Blanton-Stroud has created smart, scrappy, satisfying women’s history. Poster Girl is an absorbing mystery and a fascinating historical fiction story.  As with her previous novels, we learn that Jane Benjamin is flawed, over-zealous, ambitious, has no filter on her mouth, and among the most lovable characters you will find.  I just love this new author.  I can find nowhere on her site that she has another novel in the works.  I sure hope so!

I whole-heartedly recommend Poster Girl.  I suggest you read her three novels in the Jane Benjamin series in order.  While Blanton-Stroud does fill in all the information you need to know, I find it quite intriguing to watch Jane Benjamin grow and change, and to understand from whence she came.

March 2024