You Cannot Save That Which You Do Not Love

“You can’t save what you don’t love” are the first lines of this novel, and throughout the entire novel, Wiggins and her characters grapple with what can be saved and how ineffective love is as an agent of protection (1). This is a novel about loss. Some of this loss is personal, as in the loss of Stryker and Lou, and some of it is national, as in the human losses at Pearl Harbor. Some also are international as in the losses in Nazi concentration camps and the loss of innocence that occurred as a people when humanity realized that great evils on the scale of the concentration camps are still possible.

Throughout it all, the main characters try to save those and that which they love. Possibly the most notable of these cases is when Rocky...