April Smith’s A Star for Mrs. Blake is a historical novel that visits a near-forgotten chapter of America’s history:

The United States Congress in 1929 passed legislation to fund travel for mothers of the fallen soldiers of World War I to visit their sons’ graves in France. Over the next three years, 6,693 Gold Star Mothers made the trip. In this emotionally charged, brilliantly realized novel, April Smith breathes life into a unique moment in American history, imagining the experience of five of these women.

They are strangers at the start, but their lives will become inextricably intertwined, altered in indelible ways. These very different Gold Star Mothers travel to the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery to say final good-byes to their sons and come together along the way to face the unexpected: a death, a scandal, and a secret revealed.

None of these pilgrims will be as affected as Cora Blake, who has lived almost her entire life in a small fishing village off the coast of Maine, caring for her late sister’s three daughters, hoping to fill the void left by the death of her son, Sammy, who was killed on a scouting mission during the final days of the war. Cora believes she is managing as well as can be expected in the midst of the Depression, but nothing has prepared her for what lies ahead on this unpredictable journey, including an extraordinary encounter with an expatriate American journalist, Griffin Reed, who was wounded in the trenches and hides behind a metal mask, one of hundreds of “tin noses” who became symbols of the war.

In this short conversation, we talk about the real-life inspiration for her story and how the themes of A Star for Mrs. Blake still resonate today, sometimes painfully so.

Biographile: What inspired you to write A Star for Mrs. Blake?

April Smith: I was inspired by the real-life diary of a young lieutenant named Thomas Hammond who escorted a real-life group of Gold Star Mothers on their tour to France in 1931. It was given to me by Nicholas Hammond, who is the son of Thomas Hammond. Nicholas, parenthetically, is an actor/writer and he is one of the original children in The Sound of Music.

He comes from a military family: Both his father, Thomas, and Thomas’s father, who was also named Thomas, were distinguished colonels in the Army. They’re both buried at Arlington. All of that backstory existed, and it is used in the book. The facts about the [fictitious]Thomas’s life are all true, and were vetted and approved by his family.

I have to hand it to them for making the fictional leap. This isn’t a biography or documentary about him, and they accepted the fictionalization of his character. This all became very real to me through the diary and also the emotional experiences of mothers losing their children overseas and having no way of finding closure. This resonates with me. I’m a mother of two grown children. This remains very contemporary, obviously, with the wars that we’re in. This whole business of covering up the caskets when they come back shows the power of military burial and honoring soldiers, and the necessity and need for it to be open and experienced by the entire nation.

BIOG: Did you find it difficult to make the leap from suspense fiction to historical fiction?

AS: There really isn't a difference for me between historical fiction and contemporary fiction when you’re writing about emotions on the page. That is the essence of a good story anyway, and it doesn’t really matter where or what time it takes place, although context, of course, is still important.

In the 1930s there were certain cultural contexts that defined this novel. For example, prejudice. This was a time of great racial and ethnic prejudice. Black women who had lost their sons were sent on segregated trips. They didn’t travel in first class accommodations: They went on freight ships. They were served different food, too. That is a strong story point in the book. Divisions within ethnic groups -- the Italians, the Jews and the Irish -- were also very clear and not always friendly. That’s a part of the book too. This is a group of women of great cultural diversity thrown together in a time of deep unrest within the world. That changed the context of the book and gave it real urgency.

BIOG: We don’t see too many war stories told from the perspective of mothers who lost their sons. Why do you think that is?

AS: I think that the general perception is that war is about men. Men create them and fight them, traditionally, and it takes place on a political level that has nothing to do with women. It certainly didn’t in the thirties. Women didn’t have the vote during this war. They didn’t have a say. That’s part of what motivated me. I get really angry about that. These children were taken from them and they were left to bear the burden of the nation’s wounds - and they still are today.

BIOG: Do shared hardships make for stronger bonds than shared triumphs?

AS: Yes, I think that they do, because shared hardship means shared trauma. Trauma is very powerful: It’s enduring in your psyche. If you go through something like 9/11 with a stranger then that’s going to change your whole brain in deep ways that I don’t think that triumph will do.

BIOG: We’ve been in a near-constant state of war since 9/11. Did you see this as an opportunity to comment on our current conflict and the tragedy of lost lives, or was that something you hoped to avoid?

AS: I imagined that the reader would make those connections. Again, my feelings are with the mothers of our soldiers at war. Believe me, this isn’t a soap box for them. No one asked me to write it for them.

BIOG: I know that you wrote this on spec. You must have felt strongly about the story.

AS: I did. Interestingly, the two novels I wrote on spec, North of Montana and A Star for Mrs. Blake are probably among the strongest of my work. It’s passion. I was supposed to write another Ana Grey book. That doesn't mean that I won’t write another Ana Grey book, but I didn’t at the time. It was passion, but I think it was also that my father just died. He had encouraged me to be a writer. He was a doctor and had published a couple of science fiction short stories on his own. Suddenly you realize that time is limited, and I had this story bouncing around for so many years and if I wasn’t going to write it when I had access to those emotions and grief then I never would.

BIOG: You did a lot of research in writing the book. Was there a lot of archival material available?

AS: There is if you know where to look for it. I actually went to Washington, DC, and visited an archive there in the suburbs. None of that was available online when I started doing this in the eighties. Also helpful were the historical societies in Deer Isle, Maine. We had rented there for ten years and I love the area. I interviewed people who had lived through the depression in Maine to get that aspect of the story.

BIOG: Were you able to go to Europe to visit some of the sites in the book?

AS: I did. It’s not like I’m a millionaire and can travel when I want, so I always try to work these into family vacations. The reason I got to Europe was that my son was studying in Italy. While the family was in Italy visiting him, he and I did a tour of the battlefields. We had tour guides who narrated the courses of the battlefields for us and I got the feel of it: the air and the smell, as well as the spookier qualities. I don’t know if you’ve been to Gettysburg or any other big battlefield, but it just hangs in the air.

BIOG: I know that the government had its own reasons for funding these trips for Gold Star Mothers. It wasn't strictly a humanitarian gesture. Can you talk about that?

AS: It was during the Great Depression and these trips were front page news in small town papers. They promoted patriotism and were distractions from bread lines. It was kind of a PR campaign to show that the federal government was in charge and was taking care of things in a time of uncertainty.

BIOG: Cora Blake is a very strong, take charge kind of person. Is this a consequence of her loss, or do you see this as innate to her being?

AS: That’s who she is, and who she would have been no matter what. She’s an independent, educated woman from Maine, and she made her own life by pursuing that education until she got sidetracked by getting pregnant. I think she’s always been a leader. That’s part of her biography: She volunteers at the school, she takes care of the neighbors’ kids. She’s a pillar of the community.

BIOG: Are you anything like her?

AS: I have a sense of adventure, and so does she. We both have a sense of curiosity, and maybe the other thing that we share together is empathy. We’re also both very organized.

BIOG: What do you want readers to take away from this book?

AS: I want them to find it an entertaining and satisfying read, and I hope that they would be moved by the story and the drama as a piece of work, and to maybe question their own involvement in the great community in terms of policy -- to make their own voices heard and to create awareness for the silent sufferers and silent patriots who don’ take the news, who don’t get parades, who don’t get medals form the White House, who don’t wear uniforms, but have sacrificed for our country in ways that we should be very grateful for.