Publication: January 24th 2017 by Sky Pony Press
Source: Received this for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review via NetGalley. Thank you!
Goodreads Summary: Romney Marsh, July 1940. When invasion threatens, you have to grow up quickly. Sixteen-year-old Peggy has been putting on a brave face since the fall of France, but now the enemy is overhead, and the rules are changing all the time. Staying on the right side of the law proves harder than she expects when a plane crash-lands in the Marsh: it's Peggy who finds its pathetic, broken pilot; a young Polish man, Henryk, who stays hidden in a remote church, secretly cared for by Peggy. As something more blossoms between the two, Peggy's brother Ernest's curiosity peaks and other secrets come to light, forcing Peggy and Henryk to question all the loyalties and beliefs they thought they held dear.
In one extraordinary summer the lives of two young people will change forever, in a tense and gripping historical drama from Lydia Syson, the author of the acclaimed A WORLD BETWEEN US.
Goodreads Page
My Thoughts:
| I really enjoy reading stories about the people who lived through WWII. Perhaps it was sparked as a child when I first had to read Number the Stars. Perhaps it was sparked from the photos you see of women seeing their men off to war and the photos of victory when the war finally ended. Regardless of the reason, I really enjoy learning about the time period and people's stories of what life was like. So I was extremely excited about reading this book. Most of what I've read for this time period focused on Jewish people and those intimately connected with them. This is much different and I was looking forward to getting a glimpse into a different set of people in the same conflict. Obviously, I like the setting of this book and the background of it. I think the characters' backgrounds bring quite a bit to it and I like that it envelops some more obscure people and topics that aren't focused on traditionally for the time period. You get to read about not only characters living in England during the time, but of the consequences of refusing to fight and being deemed a cowardly pacifist, of the role of Polish airmen assisting in the fight against Hitler and joining forces with the British, of what it was like living in the country outside of London rather than the destruction that was wrecked upon the city. I enjoyed learning about these topics and liked the way they were brought in throughout the story. The characters were okay. I didn't particularly like any of them to be honest but they weren't unpleasant to read about by any means. Ernest got on my nerves throughout the book and I felt all of the characters except Henryk were pretty underdeveloped. I also had a hard time connecting with the characters but that could perhaps be chalked up to the book being in third person rather than first. The writing style was difficult to get on with for me. I found it difficult to read at times because only phrases would be used rather than a sentence so the reader is left to try to follow an awkward train of thought without it truly being a train of thought as it's told from third person. I also didn't care for the alternating points of view each chapter. I normally don't mind too much switching characters' perspectives but I would become frustrated when something exciting was finally about to happen only to be taken away to another boring plotline. And that brings me to my final point: I found it to be boring. The beginning was exciting but it went downhill for me after that. There were definitely parts of it that I liked but overall the book felt like it was going nowhere for the majority of it. The ending was a bit more exciting but I was left feeling a bit confused and dissatisfied by the characters' endings being left open. Overall, I feel that there are more interesting books dealing with this time period and I would not read this again. |
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