Following a miscarriage and the accidental death of her husband Earl Honneywell in 1939, Iris Gilda Bakken returns to Waziya, Minnesota. Soon after, she’s hired as a nurse at the offices of Drs. Gallagher & Swenson and marries Harrison Elmer Lawrence, who converts Sherm’s Shaves barbershop into his private dental office. After just a month of newlywed life, Harrison is summoned to report for military service. Initially ministering to the minor wounds of soldiers, he’s gradually exposed to hazardous frontline action when he joins the aviation engineer corps to support the military operations that will culminate in D-Day. After witnessing horrific deaths and the hellish aftermath of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, Harrison can no longer write to Iris, who begins to assume that he’s permanently MIA. The novel’s opening chapter is powerful: As Iris fortifies herself with a stale sandwich for the long bus ride home, she grabs extra paper napkins from a rest stop cafe to stanch her miscarriage blood, which continues to flow. The narrative impact is greatly diminished and the pace slackens as the focus shifts to Harrison before alternating between him and Iris. The novel becomes a page-turner again only after Harrison is drafted and departs from Waziya for the European front, where his anxiety about whether or not he’ll survive the war and reunite with Iris becomes the novel’s propelling narrative drive. The two narratives recall parallel lines that never meet; the novel would benefit from continuous focus on either Iris or Harrison in one seamless storyline. Such focus could stimulate a reading experience where parallel narrative trajectories, due south or otherwise, might converge more powerfully.