Hold Strong: A Novel

Wow, wow, wow! This is a standalone book by Robert Dugoni (The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell); coauthored with Jeff Langholz and Chris Crabtree. The storytelling was exceptional; you couldn't tell who the writer was. This is a fictional story between Sam Carlson, recent high school graduate working in small town Minnesota at the local theater and Sarah Haber, his sweetheart and college bound math whiz. Sam joins the National Guard as a means to pay for college. Things go very differently for Sam when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and he is sent to the Philippines and is captured as a POW. Brutalized by the Bataan Death March and POW camps, Sam is one of 1,800 men herded onto the Japanese hellship known as the Arisan Mura. The men are starved and weakened as they are held in the cargo hold of the ship. The brutality is unspeakable, unimaginable. Yet, Sam hangs on the belief that he will come home to Sarah.
Sarah has been recruited to Washington D.C. to use her math skills in the secret field of code breaking. Her role keeps advancing and she finds herself in Hawaii where she intercepts a message about a Japanese convoy. The Navy's mission is clear; sink the Arisan Mura and send it to the bottom of the China Sea. The lives of Sam and Sarah are about to collide in one shocking act of WWII.

Although Sam and Sarah are fictional characters, they represent composites of men and women who did play a critical role. I read somewhere this story took 12 years to write. The amount of research is extraordinary. The afterword/notes and bibliography at the end of the book are not to be missed. They are an extra 100 pages but well worth the time to read.

This novel is based on true accounts of men serving in the Philippine theater of World War II. It contains a lot of interesting historical information about a part of the war that is not as well-known. The story is compelling. However, the descriptions of the horrors inflicted upon US POW‘s by the Japanese Are truly horrific and not for the faint of heart.