Review: A Caramel Sky

It is Auckland, 1935. Grace Freeman and Charlie Harrison are still in secondary school when their paths cross as they ride the same bus to their separate schools. Months pass as Charlie shyly watches Grace from afar. Slowly, the two become better acquainted, making plans for sunset picnics and Sunday roasts to meet each other’s families. A powerful bond develops between them, and in 1939, “just before the world went mad,” they secretly become engaged, thrilled to soon be married despite their parents’ worries that they’re too young. But “war arrived on New Zealand’s doorstep on 19 June 1940,” and everything changes.

Charlie joins the air force; Grace signs on with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Their respective mothers, Alice and Nora, are determined to keep the young couple apart for the time being. Missing Grace and feeling lost, Charlie takes a wrong turn and chooses a path that will alter his course forever. While in the air force, Charlie works in telecommunications:

“As the Pacific conflict widened, demands grew for military and civilian expertise to help instal the new communications systems. Charlie’s crew, a group of engineers and technicians trained to devise solutions in the field, were responsible for the south-east Pacific. These telecommunications mechanicians, the ‘telemechs’ as they were called, were to put in place and maintain telephone cables, telegraph and code machines, and other cable and wireless devices.”

Yearning to piece his life back together, Charlie uses his radio contacts to try and reach Grace. Yet despite his expertise, the one vital message he is desperate to send—to let Grace know that he still loves her—gets lost.

A Caramel Sky, Kayleen Hazlehurst’s moving historical romance novel, is a heart-breaking love story set in wartime New Zealand and bookended by 21st century vignettes. Hazlehurst’s prose is a love letter to this beautiful country:

“At the top of the hill a collar of pōhutukawa secured the cliff face with an overhanging lattice or roots and runners. A path, wide enough to walk down single file, snaked its way to the beach. At an exposed section, a wooden bridge was bolted to the bluff above a steep drop. Red-hot pokers grew in congregations among the succulents, their leaves falling in skirts around orange-red shafts of blossom.”

The book tells the story of Grace and Charlie as they grow up and into their long and separate but connected lives. This is a story of chance encounters, missed opportunities, lost connections, thwarted hopes and abiding faith. It is a story of enduring love—both that between two young lovers and the more fraught, conflicted love between mothers and their children.

The mothers in this novel (there are four who wield the most influence but to name the other two would be a bit of a spoiler) mostly mean well but, like mothers everywhere, they sometimes find that their plans are at odds with their children’s most cherished hopes. Hazlehurst’s novel shows us how these mothers shape the adults of the next generation, with all of the attendant joys as well as resentments that this process entails.

A Caramel Sky ushers us through decades of love and loss, and we end on a bittersweet yet satisfying note. At its core, this is a novel that defines and redefines what it means to claim for oneself “a life well lived.”

Reviewed by Maggie Trapp