[Download] "Cinderella Liberty" by Darryl Ponicsan ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Cinderella Liberty
- Author : Darryl Ponicsan
- Release Date : January 27, 2019
- Genre: Fiction & Literature,Books,Literary,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 1439 KB
Description
Author of THE LAST DETAIL and LAST FLAG FLYING
We first meet John Baggs, YN 2, U.S. Navy, soaking his very sore backside in a sitz bath at sea, aboard the USS Begonia. This is Baggs' second enlistment. He's an unlikely sailor—onetime physics major, possible minister—but the Navy's a lot preferable to science or the pulpit, despite its absurdities, and he can still enjoy the pleasure of sins he wasn't willing to renounce.
Then came the day he presented his ailment to the ship's doctor and was told he needed surgery and a thirty-day stay at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia. Not for John Baggs a conventional hospitalization, discharge, and return to duty. In the ultimate bureaucratic snafu, the Navy loses Baggs' records. He is officially nonexistent. He can't be discharged from the hospital—or transferred, reassigned, promoted, or paid. He seems condemned forever to his hospital niche though he's long since recovered.
His superiors take pity on his limbo after a while and grant Baggs Cinderella liberty—off each evening and from noon on weekends, as long as he checks into his hospital bed by midnight. But it's a lonely existence for a penniless sailor until he meets bargirl Maggie Paul. Feckless, streetwise Maggie and her three children become John Baggs' life for a few hours each day. It is a crazy idyll that this impromptu family shapes for a few months—and, as idylls must, it ends.
But not for keeps, and not in any way one might have imagined. For John Baggs, nonperson, becomes a person again—if not John Baggs. Instant, permanent fatherhood accompanies his new identity in an ending so raucous and touching that the reader finishes these pages in a surge of laughter and tears.
Darryl Ponicsan's novel is a gusty delight.