A Promise to Arlette by Serena Burdick: A Riveting WWII War Bride Tale

In 1952 Lexington, Massachusetts, former war bride Ida Whipple seems to have an idyllic life with her husband Sidney and their two daughters. When a neighbor boasts about owning a photo attributed to Man Ray—one that Ida knows was taken by her friend Arlette during WWII—Ida steals the print and heads to California to seek answers. Sidney sets off in hot pursuit, determined to protect his family as they both uncover dangerous truths about loyalty and survival.

My Review

Serena Burdick packs every page with tension and emotion. I was hooked from Ida’s first agonized glance at the stolen photograph to Sidney’s frantic drive across dusty highways. Burdick’s portrayal of wartime sacrifice and postwar guilt feels remarkably real, and the clash between Ida’s past in France and her present in small-town America kept me on edge. By the final chapter, you’ll be both heartbroken and inspired, convinced that facing painful secrets and confronting the past is the only way forward.

You can get a copy of A Promise to Arlette on Amazon or Bookshop.

If this has you intrigued, read an excerpt from A Promise to Arlette below.

A Promise to Arlette Excerpt Preview

IDA WAS, SHE BELIEVED, a person who could sense danger. She learned this from her father and brothers, the men in her life. She had no memory of her brothers as children. She knew them only by
their deep voices, thick thighs, and wide chests, by the scent of manure and sweat and barley they carried in from the barn. Her family lived on the outskirts of Petersfield, England. Her brothers were hardworking, obedient boys who Ida understood didn’t necessarily want to hurt her, but were forced, at times, to teach her a lesson. They were the ones who taught her to swoop and dive under a swinging hand or a hard object, to be quick and clever and guarded.

Ida was not well behaved. She was precocious and loud and given to fits of anger when she was not taken seriously, which was often becauseshe was the youngest, and a girl.

When she thought of her father, she thought of the slick sound of a belt sliding through pant loops, of the heavy sigh he gave right before the strap came down, and the tired way his shoulders dropped after a lashing, as if he’d beaten something out of himself too. She remembered
how he, unlike her brothers, smelled of freshly laundered clothes, of soap, and a faint hint of tobacco. Mostly, she remembered the deep blue of his eyes, and how she learned to look straight into them and tell a bold lie.

She lied to her mother as well, a woman equally as dangerous as her father, just less obvious about it. Words were her mother’s weapon, dag-gers she aimed straight at the bull’s-eye of Ida’s heart. As a child, Ida would stand stock-still as those sharp points of anger flew from her mother’s mouth, hitting their mark every time. Her mother was quite skilled at it. There was never any preamble. She’d hurl the insults with deft precision under the strangest circumstances. They’d be walking
home from church and she’d tell Ida she was daft, an idiot. “Why do you walk like that? What’s wrong with you?” Ida would think, Like what? wondering what was wrong with her. She eventually realized she was doing the very thing her mother wanted: questioning her own worth, her decency, against her mother’s.

Beatings were easier for Ida to understand. She was being punished because she talked back. She had not done her chores. She had spit on her brother’s shoe or thrown dirt at the barn door. Whereas her mother’s eruptions were abrupt and seemingly unprompted. It didn’t matter what
Ida did or didn’t do, her mother always found a way to ridicule her. Why be good? Ida thought. Why strive for obedience when it didn’t work anyway?

Instead, she armored herself, growing tense and steely so that by the time she was eighteen years old, her mother’s scorn pinged off of her with empty, hollow thuds.

Most of the time.

Like all imperfect things, there were chinks in Ida’s armor—weaknesses, vulnerabilities.

Perhaps that’s why, when she glimpsed a world outside of her own, she sacrificed everything to grasp it.

Excerpted from A Promise to Arlette by Serena Burdick. Copyright © 2025 by Serena Burdick. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Ready for More?

If Ida’s journey has you intrigued, grab your copy of A Promise to Arlette today!

You can get a copy of A Promise to Arlette on Amazon or Bookshop.

When you’ve finished reading, come back and share your thoughts in the comments—I can’t wait to hear which moment resonated most with you!