She Built Ships

by Jeane Slone

She Built Ships
During WWII

Historical Fiction

What do the Port Chicago explosion, Tuskegee Airmen, Japanese American internment, and women welders have in common?

She Built Ships During WWII weaves all these fascinating events into one fast-paced novel. This fiction immerses the reader into the era of the forties on the home front. Three diverse women, a white welder, a black welder and a Japanese American store keeper, experience gender and ethnic discrimination in a man’s world.

Praise for She Built Ships

Cover your eyes! I have a flash for you. Jeane Slone has written another World War Two historical fiction that will make you blink. She Built Ships During WWII, is a novel about Lolly, a housewife who became a skilled welder in a naval shipyard. Ms. Slone weaves a story of the difficulty about keeping home and hearth whole while fighting the prejudices of the era and changing women’s roles in American society. Slone’s historical fiction reveals many of America’s painful moments during a tragic time and continues her own mission of giving women their rightful place in the victory in World War II.  ~ Michael D. Mullins, Vice President, Military Writers Society of America. Author of Vietnam in Verse.

The details that Jeane Slone fills this well-researched novel with make the pages of She Built Ships During World War II, come alive. It’s the 1940’s and Uncle Sam collects silk stockings for gunpowder bags, Victory Visitors knock on the door, food is rationed and husbands leave home. Lolly corresponds with her friend, Sumi who has gone from running the community market to a Japanese American Internment Camp at the San Bruno race-track. Sumi is pregnant. Lolly’s husband enlists in the Navy and now both Joe and Lolly will see their lives take unexpected curves. Hattie works with Lolly building ships. She is colored and her husband, who is a Tuskegee Airman and finds himself in constant turmoil. Share these women’s struggles, how they manage their children, jobs, their loves, and the fleeting joys, they find in these difficult times.  ~ Linda Loveland Reid, President of The Redwood Writers Club

With meticulous research on WWII era, Slone weaves an intricate story of cruelty, compassion and love, reminding us of the injustice of the internment of Japanese Americans and racial prejudice in the armed forces. The courage of women welders who built ships while their husbands were at war is depicted so well that the characters come to life. We watch the heroine, Lolly, struggle to keep her family together while she works as a welder and her husband is away. A tender romance is threaded throughout the book and we agonize with her as she brings it to an inevitable conclusion. Between the fascinating and sometimes little known historical facts, and the larger than life sympathetic characters, the book is a page-turner to the very end.  ~  Alla Crone, author of Rodina and The Other Side of Life