Our Own Kind

Our Own Kind is a World War II novel without the combat, a novel about the America the soldiers left behind. Anne Weiss depicts here in families of different social and income levels the effects of the war in daily experience as well as on the greater occasions of weddings and funerals. Hers is an Our Town view of an upstate New York town called Westerveldt, where the importance of the characters behavior and conversation is historically clear to us while dimly perceptible to them. They feel helplessly caught up in events they cant control.

The Osterhoudts and Van Leuvens, the old established families, as well as the Sloanes and Mancusos in trade and contract work, see their sons dying overseas, their daughters marrying out of their own class, the war affecting their customs and privileges, all sorts of changes taking place in a world they thought they knew. As the author makes clear, this uncertainty and threat to their own kind affects everyone in the novel of every class and age. In a style of subtle understatement Anne Weiss shows her two main characters, Emily Osterhoudt, home from college, and Mary D. Van Leuven, still in high school, as shrewd inside observers forcing the action while resisting social pressure if not rebelling against circumstance and upbringing. Our Own Kind is a many-sided moving account of a World War II America that prefigures something of our more recent homeland anxieties.