Laurel returns to her childhood home to gather with her younger sisters and brother to prepare as their mom gets sicker and sicker. Laurel keeps thinking back to the day when she was a teenager and she saw a man walk up to her mom, argue a bit and then saw her mom stab the man, killing him. Laurel never questioned it as a child but now that her mom may not be with them much longer, she wants answers. The story splices what Laurel finds with a narrative from her mother during 40s era England, during the Blitz of WWII.
The real pull of the book here is Dorothy's story. How she wound up in England, who she fell in love with, who she made friends with, and how the war impacted her. Laurel and her siblings didn't do anything for me, aside from her role in driving Dorothy's story forward. Even then, sometimes Laurel and the family were taking up pages and not doing anything for the story. This book definitely could have been shorter if not for that.
In Dorothy's story, there was always something about her that just didn't seem right. I was happy when the ending confirmed my thoughts and thought that it was really well executed. What a thrilling way to end a book! I enjoyed this.
First Line: "Rural England, a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a summer's day at the start of the 1960s."
Rating:
(4/5)
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