Reviews

I was given this book from netgalley - an immense thank you to the publisher and author!

I am so chuffed to have got to read this book early! I met Lissa Evans at a literary festival last year and she promised a further instalment about Vee and Noel but that it might be a while in coming so imagine my delight when I saw this book and then was accepted to review it! An absolutely lovely lady whose writing is a dream.

This is, as I say the next bit of Noel’s story and follows on four years after the end of Crooked Heart. It’s 1944 the blitz is over but London is now dealing with doodlebugs and V2s. Vee runs a boarding house in Mattie’s house - the mouse hole - where Noel was looked after and where the Flea lived with Mattie in the old days. The four lodgers teach Noel who is safe from a children’s home because Vee is now using the name Margery Overs. The starting point for Vee’s story is her witnessing an accident whereas Noel’s narrative is to do with his longing for more knowledge of Mattie.

We are also reintroduced to Winnie one of the Amazons from Old Baggage. She is now a warden in charge of a team who responds to the damage inflicted by the V2 rockets. She struggles with a complicated relationship with her beautiful twin sister and the fact that her husband of only a month was captured four years prior and has spent the war in a POW camp.

It is brilliant to be back in the world of these people again. They are so well created that you can hear their individual voices as you read. Vee in my opinion is particularly strong. A good woman who really doesn’t know she’s good and kind. And her relationship with Noel still brings the same heart warming poignancy it did in Crooked Heart. But the characterisation is so remarkable that this is a rounded, complete human being who steps out of the book.

The same with Mattie who obviously is not in this book but who’s incredible characterisation bursts from the pages. We need to find out about her as much as Noel does and horde the information in the same way.

The human story of the war, of love and loss and mistakes is what makes this novel special. It has a plot and it is never slack but it really isn’t the point of the novel - this is time spent with old friends. All of it is tongue in cheek, lightly humorous despite its grim topic, it never lets you forget that humans can’t live in a state of tragedy without some comic relief.

Lissa Evans writes as though instructed by Mr Bennett ‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’. We laugh along with Noel in his closet! And dread when Mr Reddish starts on about a young lady he used to know.

There are some beautiful descriptions here that are written with pinpoint accuracy, Winnie’s sister is described as ‘striking rather than beautiful – seemingly drawn with a stronger pen than everyone else.’ So simple but gets exactly the point across whilst her description of bombed Edwardian villas as ‘reduced to crenellated bungalows’ really seemed to capture the destruction but with a lightness of touch that fits with the whole tone of her work.

Of course the best bit for a reader like me was when Noel states our truth that: ‘Hobbies are for people who don’t read books’! I might have that quotation on my grave...!

I read a lot of books but few are as pleasant to read as Ms Evans’ and I look forward to everything she writes in the future. My only complaint - and it is a serious one - is that the book was too short!