I read about half. I felt that not enough was revealed at that point about whatever was going on. I liked the characters and the information about radio, but felt impatient with the plot. ( )

BOTTOM-LINE:
Fantastic view of a wartime radio drama
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PLOT OR PREMISE:
The year is 1942, and Jack Delaney is working as a writer for the local radio station where weird things happen, like actors going missing and potential German spies hiding in plain sight.
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WHAT I LIKED:
The story starts off confused, and a hint of someone in trouble. Delaney has to escape a chain gang to help a woman he loves, even if she is already spoken for in his mind. And the trail leads to a radio station on a coastal town where he gets work. At that point, the story is three-fold -- a mystery involving German spies, a love story of sorts, and him learning about the radio busiiness as a writer. The radio business part is awesome.
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WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
The German mystery is confused and the love story doubly so. Most of it makes very little sense and is more "hinted at" than "made real".
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DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I am not personal friends with the author, nor do I follow him on social media. ( )

The best part of the book was the history of radio. There was the hope that radio in the forties was on the brink of something great but it was being dumbed down for the masses. The radio station in this story WHAR was going to be ground breaking. Radio never achieved the dream. But the dream was nice while it lasted. Television has the same struggles. ( )

We both read this. Javaczuk liked it; I liked bits of it, enough to finish the book, but it was slow reading.Interesting historical perspectives, but rather dry at times. I liked it more when the author focused in on the Holly story, rather than the scripts. But I'm a romantic at heart. ( )

Not what I was expecting. What I thought this would be, from the book description, and what I wanted was something along the lines of (though probably more serious than) … oh dear, this will take a little searching. AMC series, radio station – Ah: Remember WENN (1996 – 1998). I did, in the end, remember. "… Set at the fictional Pittsburgh radio station WENN in the early 1940s, it depicted events (both dramatic and comic) in the personal and professional lives of the station's staff in the era before and during World War II." Yes. I'd like some of that, please. (Seriously, I'd love another book set in a 40's radio station. I'll have to do some hunting.) The book description talks about "an English actor who walked out of the radio station six years ago and was never seen again" – I love those stories. There's something about a story about a man who enters a lane and never comes out the other end … it's as good as a locked room murder.

The story Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime begins to tell is more of a conspiracy tale, involving men in dark glasses and clandestine surveillance and secret identities, none of which seems to have anything to do with the war going on. About a third of the way in it – and Jack Dulaney, the main character – finally settled into WHAR radio in New Jersey, and it started being part of what I wanted, in spades: behind the scenes in 40's radio. It was wonderful, and made me very glad I stuck it out.

Jack – or Jordan Ten Eyck, as he calls himself in this new life – is something of a wunderkind; he always wrote, and now adapts to radio drama like a pony to a field of clover, and he's amazing at it. A little too amazing, to tell the truth; the definitions of "Mary Sue" (in this case Gary Stu) kept going through my mind every time he knocked out another stunning script in an hour and a half, and every time he flouted the rules and was barely chastised when anyone else would have been fired and blackballed. He even marvels about how he's running the place in just a couple of months; it's a bit much. Particularly in conjunction with how his story ends …

For me it took a very long time to click into gear. There were a few storylines being juggled here, and I was somewhat disappointed that the one I was most interested in was given rather short shrift, and was, in fact, cut off. The ending wasn't what I would have wanted. I enjoyed the book – but I would have had a lot more fun with it if the radio setting had been the star. ( )