Stevie‘s review of Secrets of a Charmed Life by Susan Meissner
Historical Fiction published by NAL 03 Feb 15
With all the anniversaries kicking around this year and last, it’s no surprise to see so many books set during the first and second world wars. Which is great for someone like me with a strong interest in 20th Century social history. However, being interested in the era, combined with having lived in (or had friends in) many and varied parts of the UK, means that I’m easily thrown out of a story by details that don’t feel quite right. So how did this book, which I gather has gained stellar reviews elsewhere, live up to my stringent demands?
It all starts off well. In the framing story, visiting American scholar Kendra has been put in touch with elderly artist Isabel, as an ideal interview candidate for her project on women’s lives during the London blitz. Isabel has given few details about her past before, but now, as she prepares for her birthday party, she begins her story by dropping two bombshells: her real name isn’t Isabel, and her age isn’t the one that’s being celebrated later in the day. However, she’s now ready to tell the truth about what happened to her during the war.
In the late spring of 1940, Emmy and her sister Julia are living in the East End of London with their unmarried mother – and, on occasion, Julia’s father. Emmy’s ambition is to design wedding dresses, and so she applies for a part-time job in a bridal shop, taking with her the designs she has been drawing every spare moment she gets. Having lied about her age, Emmy is hired with the offer of being taught to use a sewing machine and the possibility of later being mentored by a top designer relative of the shop owner. However, as the summer draws on, the threat of enemy bombing means that the girls have to be evacuated to the safety of the countryside.
So far so good, but then I was thrown out of the story by three details, and it never quite managed to get my attention back. First and second were the matters relating to the cars; petrol was rationed in 1939, and yet no one commented on the fact that characters drove distances they could have quite easily travelled on foot (or by pony and trap in some cases). On top of that, Emmy thinks of the car as a jalopy – a very American term to my ear – rather than marvelling that she’s travelling in a car at all: petrol rationing or no. Then thirdly there were the turtles. A minor detail, but the British Isles have no native freshwater turtles, and while I can accept that feral terrapins might have been living in a pond in the Cotswolds in the 1940s, I would have liked someone to have commented on how they got there.
Anyway, Emmy and Julia settle with their host family (not foster family as the book repeatedly tells us): middle-aged widow, Charlotte, and her brain-injured sister, Rose. Emmy hasn’t given up her dreams of becoming a designer and when an opportunity arises for her to travel to London to meet with her potential mentor (another word that jarred slightly in the context of a 1940s story), she schemes to run away, leaving Julia behind. But things don’t go to plan, and the two girls end up back in the East End on the worst night of the blitz. Emmy’s dreams fall through, Julia is lost to her, and all she can think to do is to take on the identity of her former employer’s slightly older, now deceased, daughter in order to avoid the attention of Social Services while she searches for her missing sister.
I read this book to the end, and the story did grip me at times, but then something else would jar and I’d wonder all over again whether to just give up. On the other hand, it’s not a badly written book – historical details aside – so I’m sure plenty of other readers will enjoy it far more than I did.
Grade: C
Summary:
The author of A Fall of Marigolds journeys from the present day to World War II England, as two sisters are separated by the chaos of wartime…
She stood at a crossroads, half-aware that her choice would send her down a path from which there could be no turning back. But instead of two choices, she saw only one—because it was all she really wanted to see…
Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for decades…beginning with who she really is. What Kendra receives from Isabel is both a gift and a burden–one that will test her convictions and her heart.
1940s, England. As Hitler wages an unprecedented war against London’s civilian population, hundreds of thousands of children are evacuated to foster homes in the rural countryside. But even as fifteen-year-old Emmy Downtree and her much younger sister Julia find refuge in a charming Cotswold cottage, Emmy’s burning ambition to return to the city and apprentice with a fashion designer pits her against Julia’s profound need for her sister’s presence. Acting at cross purposes just as the Luftwaffe rains down its terrible destruction, the sisters are cruelly separated, and their lives are transformed…
No excerpt found.
