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Tag: World Wars

Their Finest Hour and a Half, Lissa Evans

Forgive the probable idiocy and inanity of this review. I read Their Finest Hour and a Half a few weeks ago, and now it is hard for me to remember things about it. It is a funny book–I kept saying “comic book” but that’s not really want I meant–about London during the Blitz. More or less, it centers on a propaganda film the British Ministry of Information is making. The characters are Edith, a seamstress and aspiring clothing designer who keeps getting bombed out; Ambrose, an aging film actor only interested in himself; and Catrin, an artist’s wife, newly tapped…

7 Comments

Nonfiction

I have been reading a lot of nonfiction this summer. It’s been fun, but I am also a little starved for fiction, and I have a massive backlist of books to investigate when I get home. Juliet Gardiner: The Thirties and Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over Here When I read Gardiner’s Wartime, I wished it had said more about the experience of being an American GI in England during World War II. Turns out the reason it didn’t is that Juliet Gardiner wrote a whole book about being an American GI in England during World War II. Overpaid, Oversexed, and Over…

43 Comments

Noel Streatfeild

I love me some Noel Streatfeild.  Turns out, she wrote several fictionalized autobiographical books about her life, and I just read two of them, A Vicarage Family and On Tour.  I think there is one more but my library very unobligingly does not have it.  She was the second of four children, and often felt out of place in her family.  Her older sister, Isobel, had asthma and as they had not yet invented the glory that is Albuterol, she was often an invalid.  The younger sister, Louise, was the beauty of the family and apparently never gave any trouble…

20 Comments

Three mini-reviews

Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq, Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger We had to read Zlata’s Diary in ninth grade, and I remember thinking, Sheesh, if I were Zlata as a grown-up, I would really wish these diaries weren’t out there.  They are just like the diaries I kept at that age, lots of Oh why is this happening to me, and How can these trivial things make me happy when there is so much darkness in my life? – the difference being, of course, that she actually had bad stuff happening to me;…

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River of Darkness, Rennie Airth

Woohoo!  Between-the-wars-in-England stories are my favorite kind!  Plus, this is a mystery (I sometimes like mysteries), and although I read the end, I didn’t need to read the end necessarily, because the killer’s identity is known to the reader for most of the book.  Lovely.  Only way to do it.  See, the suspense then wasn’t about who done it, but whether he would do it again!  (I will just tell you – he would.) In River of Darkness, Inspector John Madden, a copper scarred by his time in the trenches in the recently-over World War I, is called in on…

4 Comments

Love Is Blue, Joan Wyndham

It is difficult for me to review Joan Wyndham’s second volume of diaries.  What really can be said?  Here is what I have to say about Joan Wyndham’s second volume of diaries: “Aha!” he exclaimed. “Ein liten pinsvin,” which translated literally means “a little prickle pig”. The hedgehog had a very winning little face, but smelt abominable. We sat and played with it for a bit but then I could see a certain look on his face and he took his glasses off – always a bad sign – so held the ‘pinsvin’ firmly in my lap like a living…

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You know what I love, Internet?

Internet, I will tell you what I love.  I love stories set in Britain right before, during, between, and right after the World Wars.  I LOVE THEM.  Cf. The Little Stranger, The Shooting Party, The House at Riverton, Baltimore, Those Who Hunt the Night, Love Lessons, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Night Watch, etc.  If you say “Britain” and “World War” in your synopsis of a book, I tend to bump it way up on my reading list.  If you also say “aristocracy” and “disintegrating way of life”, I tend to put a hold on it…

10 Comments

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters

I got The Little Stranger for my birthday!  And read it on the plane back home yesterday.  Not a good plane book; I should have read Changing Planes, which would have been much better, but by the time I thought of it, it was the last leg of the flight and I was trying to catch fifteen minutes of sleep so I wouldn’t die of exhaustion.  The Little Stranger would be a perfect dark-and-stormy-night type of book.  (Not that there’s any book I wouldn’t want to read at night all cozy with a thunderstorm outside – but some are more…

6 Comments

The House at Riverton, Kate Morton

I am not able to steer myself away from books that deal with the dying aristocracy in Britain before and during and after the World Wars.  Or just books set in Britain before and during and after the World Wars (recently before and recently after, obviously; otherwise that would comprehend the whole of British history).  I love them.  I love books set in Britain in this time period even more than I love books set in the Victorian times.  At least more reliably – there are some books with Victorian settings that are shocking tedious crap. The House at Riverton…

6 Comments

The Dragonfly Pool, Eva Ibbotson

Lovely Darla at Books and Other Thoughts reviewed this book a while ago, and I was thrilled to find Eva Ibbotson had written a new book – I love her, and actually, I like her non-fantasy books best.  Still I didn’t read it for ages, and then at Charing Cross Road the other day, I almost didn’t buy it.  I’m glad I bought it!  It was wonderful! Tally is a determined little girl who gets sent off to a boarding school called Delderton as Hitler’s growing power brings the threat of war to London, where she lives with her father. …

6 Comments