She delights in her assignment to Manila-the Pearl of the Orient. January 1941, Margie Bauer is called to active duty in the Army Nurse Corps of the United States Army Reserves.

Follow a young woman whose life changes forever when she is captured and held prisoner of war by enemy forces. She’s risked everything to take a stand, but her club is a house of cards in the eye of a storm.A World War II novel based on the American military nurses who served in the Philippines.

There, she forges a new identity and opens a nightclub, where seductive beauties sing, dance, and tease secrets out of high-ranking Japanese officers while the wildly successful club and its enemy patrons help fund the resistance.īut operating undercover in the spotlight has Gina struggling to stay a step ahead of the Japanese. When the Japanese invade and her husband goes missing, Gina flees with her daughter to the Zambales Mountains to avoid capture-or worse.ĭesperate for money, medicine, and guns, the resistance recruits Gina to join their underground army and smuggles her back to Manila. War has erupted in the Pacific, spelling danger for Gina Capelli Thorpe, an American expat living in Manila. My reasoning for selecting and fictionalizing her amazing tale was to bring music, dance, and color to an otherwise dark subject.”ĭecember 1941. Though these factions show up in my story, in the end my choice was to focus the spotlight on an American woman who opened a nightclub in Manila to support the guerrillas, and who then became a spy for the Allied forces. My difficulty lay on where to focus the voice of the story: on the journalists who obtained much of their information from forbidden radio broadcasts, on medical personnel who provided contraband drugs to the prisoners, on government officials who collaborated with the underground, on the guerrillas in the mountains who unceasingly harassed Japanese military units, or the missionary families who hid in the swamps to avoid capture or worse. She has this to say about writing her most recent book: “Choosing the subject matter was easy…I would weave a story about those brave people who endured the Japanese occupation outside the prison camps. Besides reading and writing, she enjoys visits from her children and grandchildren, bicycling through the community, a hard won tennis match, and an occasional round of golf.

Solomon moved from Michigan's winter wonderland to the beautiful North Carolina coast where she lives with her husband.

Soloman to discuss her latest book, 'Along The Broken Bay.'įlora J. On Monday, August 12th, at NOON in the MC Erny Gallery, host Ben Steelman of The Star News will sit down with author Flora J.

A pledge of silence by flora j solomon