The Liberation of Sue Moody

Being trapped in a war zone has not changed much since 1939. The story of Sue Moody is still relevant today. Her story is one about survival of war, bombings, starvation, Nazi Germany, abandonment, and of simply trying to be a woman with a career in the early twentieth century. Left behind in the corner of a now decaying and battered rural house, amongst fallen beams, cobwebs, and mouse droppings, were thousands of letters, journals, manuscripts, and copies of articles and books. These crumbling boxes of pages, in this long-since-abandoned house, held the story of her life. Inspired by the detailed accounts of this journalist, Gelburd has created a compelling first-person narrative about the life of journalist Sue Moody. She draws strength from her famous writer/politician grandfather, her Quaker heritage, her career, and people that she met along the way, like Molly Brown. The book provides flashbacks into the key moments in her life that got her to where she was. As the bombs fall around her, she rides her bicycle through the back streets of Paris, searching the black markets or scavenging for chestnuts in backyards. Memories of riding horses in bucolic Wyoming, ponds in Western Massachusetts, hitchhiking across the U.S., and the fairytales she was told fill her time and take her to alternate realities and a place where she might find peace.