'The Art Student's War' is a story richly woven with the details of Italian teen Bianca "Bea" Paradiso's coming of age in World War II Detroit. From the moment we meet Bea on a streetcar where a handsome, wounded soldier gives her his seat, we are settled into a period when a gallant, fervently patriotic America believed that we would survive the war and emerge better than ever (those days, by the way, appear to be gone).
Bea is an art student who is approached about sketching wounded soldiers for the USO by her professor. The men are thrilled to be the subject of a pretty girl's attentions, and the task develops her portrait skills. But she is horrified by their wounds and the abruptness with which they come in and out of her life. No sooner does she meet them than they are dispatched home, back to battle or, in some cases, to psychiatric treatment.
When she is not sketching soldiers she is grappling with a powerful attraction to fellow art student Ronny Olsson, the striking, rebellious heir to a drugstore fortune.
Is it love? Or is love what she feels for soldier Henry Vanden Akker, a well-read mathematician and Dutch Reformed Church member who challenges Bea to think on a different plane? She comes up with the wrong answer, but the pressures of war give her very little time to contemplate her decision.
It will take years for both Bea and Detroit to mature and discover the reserves each has to move beyond the war. This is a tender novel in many ways, a gentle way to return to the past.
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