The Courtship of Eva Eldridge is by Diane Simmons, who came into possession of a trove of some 800 letters some years ago, letters "collected into fat packets and tied with loops of tightly knotted kitchen string"—hidden away in an Eastern Oregon attic. She writes that something at the time held her back from opening them and prying into their secrets, "something that felt a lot like fear." However, the woman who had saved the letters, a woman Simmons had known since childhood, had died, and named Simmons executor of her estate. Why had the woman saved them all these years if not to be found someday and their remarkable story told?

This is our introduction to The Courtship of Eva Eldridge, the story not just of one woman's quest for love, but of an era's confident belief in romantic happiness in marriage. Simmons begins the story in March 1958, in Boise, Idaho, when Eva Eldridge is thirty-five and her dreamboat husband Vick disappears after a year of seemingly blissful marriage. Moving back and forth in time, we follow Eva's evolution from a simple farm girl through her war years as a single working woman in the ship-building boom town of Portland, Oregon, then a failed post-war marriage, to her life as a cigarette girl in a glamorous hotel in Boise where she meets and marries Vick.

Through the lens of Eva's life, Simmons reflects on the rapid changes in the role of women during the second world war and immediately after: from wife and homemaker to wage-earner and back again, women were thrown out of the workforce after World War II to make room for the returning veterans. She shows us the role the media played—first calling women into performing men's civilian work during the war as a service to their country, and then promoting marriage and home as the only suitable job for women after the war.

The first half of the book is a lively interweaving of points of view. Part 2, however opens the theme of what Simmons calls "the marriage-mad fifties" with a bombshell that begins to solve the mystery that has tantalized us so far: where did Eva's beloved Vick go? A year after he disappears, Eva receives a twelve-page letter from a woman named Odette, who met and married Vick after he left Eva. Then he left Odette. Odette has discovered earlier wives, and has started to track them down. He abandoned the wives, we learn with Eva, after short marriages with no explanation. Eva and Odette collaborate in the search through letters and phone calls. Decades later, Simmons herself joins the search, using the Internet and e-mail. She locates and communicates with surviving wives, children, and others who remember Vick. All told, she discovers ten wives.

Of course she asks why, and there's no easy answer to that. Simmons's explanation for Vick's motivation is complex: Vick apparently loved weddings, from the excitement of the courtship through the pageantry of the ceremony to the romance of the honeymoon. Once that was over, he drove off in a shiny new car in search of another bride. Vick's surprise reappearance in Eva's life leads to a satisfying denouement, which I will not give away.

Toward the end of the book, Simmons reflects that Eva "came of age in a world turned upside down, one in which her parents' beliefs seemed only dimly relevant and that—right or wrong—she too had tried to follow her heart." If at times the complexity of the cast of characters and skipping around in time causes the reader's head to spin, Simmons never loses us. We can be glad that Eva's letters and story fell into the hands of a gifted storyteller with a keen eye for social analysis and deep empathy for her subject. You don't often get this much information and thoughtful interpretation in the context of a truly gripping--and true-- story.