Ellen Feldman's novel Next to Love tells the story of three women who come of age at the dawning of the Second World War. Babe, Millie, and Grace are friends, even though Babe lives below Sixth Street. All three find romance and rush into marriage as their boyfriends become soldiers. The novel falls into the big tent of chick lit, trafficking in courtship, marriage and the trials of true love, but transcends the genre through the treatment of these archetypes. Quotations that Feldman chose to introduce her work set the tone: War . . . next to love, has most captured the world's imagination (Eric Partridge) and It's all so terrible, so awful, that I constantly wonder how 'civilization' can stand war at all (Dwight D. Eisenhower)...