When it fits just right, there's nothing like a dual storyline to shine lights from varying perspectives on aspects of the human condition. For The Baker's Daughter, by Sarah M. McCoy, stories in two timelines illuminate questions of loyalty, decency, secrets and the importance of feeding one's body as well as soul.
The novel is more than one story and, indeed, it's even possible to make the case that more than one character is the baker's daughter. There is the obvious one -- Elsie is the daughter of a baker in a small German town where everyone struggles to survive as the Nazis gain power and as the war drags on. There also is Elsie's daughter, Jane, who works alongside her mother in a small town German bakery in Texas years later. And then there is a daughter of Elsie's heart, Reba, who comes to the bakery for what she thinks will be a quick interview about holiday traditions. Instead, Jane and Elsie befriend a woman who has closed off her heart, even with love from family and a good man staring her in the face.
Young Elsie is the salt of the earth that leavens good bread. She is quiet yet not passive. She misses her sister, who is in a Nazi compound set up for Aryan breeding mares (the Lebensborn Program really existed). Her life is like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale told from the viewpoint of proud family members boasting of their daughter's fate, not realizing until far too late what horrors and ruthless cruelty are there. In a grotesque pastiche of a whirlwind, fairy tale romance, a Nazi officer bestows his ring on Elsie, and this protects Elsie and her family. The German officer, Josef, is acting out of guilt from Kristallnacht. Elsie realizes she has to use the gift of his protection even as she feels guilt for not loving him.
Elsie does something far braver when fate presents the opportunity to do so. It's an impulsive move, but she shows strength in perservering with the consequences of her act.
In the present time, Reba also is separated from her sister, but it's a voluntary move. Their father was haunted by what he did in Vietnam, and after Reba discovers exactly how haunting what he did was, she wants distance from her surviving relatives. The parallel between her father and the German officer's guilt is but one of many parallels in the novel. None of the acts or characters are exact matches, but they do offer varying perspectives on such big ideas as honor, duty and fealty.
Another man has guilt over what he once believed in. Reba's fiancee is a border agent. As an American citizen who is Hispanic, Riki believes he is doing the right thing by finding and helping deport people back across the U.S.-Mexican border. Until a young boy grabs his heart.
The Baker's Daughter is written with a light touch about drastic events. People's lives are altered forever in seconds. People try to do the right thing. They feel guilt. They feel sorrow. Their paths, decades apart, show similar trajectories about the big ideas without making direct comparisons. The border patrol agents, for instance, are not likened to Nazis. But the reader knows that the actions dictated by both jobs can lead to misery for the people they hunt, that families can be torn apart and that tragedy can occur.
It is this ability to show how history repeats itself in the way people are treated, the way they are condemned not because of who they are but because of what they represent to those with the power, and the ability to let readers draw their own conclusions about individual characters and how their choices can work in or challenge the power structure, that demonstrate power in McCoy's novel.
There is much sweetness and coming together in the novel. There are touching moments and characters doing the right thing by others. There are the sins of the past to be mourned. But underneath that are the movements of society in how people in power treat those without any.
The novel works because of the two timelines in making its comparisons and contrasts. It is not as strong a work as it could be by not digging in deeper to show, for example, where Elsie got the strength to make her impulsive move and stick to it. Or was it mere cowardice on her part that once she had set upon this path, she didn't know how to turn back? What would any of us do if faced with the chance to save someone?
Even though this may not be a complex novel, there are subtleties to appreciate. McCoy is careful not to make a direct tie between the Gestapo and the Border Patrol. But thinking about how individual people get caught up in movements or bureaucracies in which individuals are crushed because of groups in which they can be sorted is a concept worth considering today. It's far too easy to find groups of people routinely demonized today. Even as a somewhat privileged person in today's American society, as a white person and a member of the middle class working in an honorable profession, I am demonized as a woman, as a teacher and as a librarian. And I don't have it nearly as bad as many others.
The Baker's Daughter reminds me of why I read fiction. Thinking about the ideas brought up in McCoy's novel, I don't get depressed. I feel rejuvenated, affirmed that caring is not wrong, that it matters to me to live by the tenents I hold dear and that what I do matters. Reading fiction isn't hiding from the world. It's gathering strength to carry on.