This isn’t really going to be an academic post, but I just wanted to write out my emotions about the final chapter of Not So Quiet. Wow. My jaw hurt at the end of this chapter because my mouth was left gaping open for so long. So much tragedy occurred in such a short span of time. I knew this was coming, we all knew this book wasn’t going to have a brighter ending than our last read. But damn. First, we read that Roy got terribly injured and is now both blind and an amputee. Next, we have to sit and read through two insufferable and rage provoking letters from both Nellie’s mother and Mrs. Evans-Mawnington about how wonderful it is that Roy is now a decorated hero. After the previous numb and sad chapters we’ve read since Nellie returned to the war effort, this really was just the icing on the cake of sadness and despair. What made it worse is Nellie’s lack of a reaction to it. She has been beaten so bloody by the war that she literally has no emotion left to give. I felt exhausted for her. Roy’s letter was a total stab in the heart as well. If all that wasn’t enough, we end the chapter with an intense air raid and all of the women she’s spent the past several months with “lying dead or dying” (70). I finished this book with a pit in my stomach. We really do see how both Nellie and Paul are destroyed by the war in different ways.