“My mother said briskly, “After you take everything upstairs, Missak, you return the cart to Donabedian as soon as possible. Maral, put the spices in the jars, and the sugar on the top shelf. The rest goes wherever you and Auntie Shakeh find space.”

That was how our war began. It didn’t start with blaring newspaper headlines announcing a pending invasion, nor was it signaled by the drone of warplanes overhead. Our war commenced that afternoon when my mother stockpiled groceries so that, no matter what this new war might bring, her family would have something to eat.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JAN 7, 2014)

The setting is World War II Paris — when the Germans begin their occupation of the city, the protagonist of this story is just turning sixteen. Maral Pegorian and her older brother, Missak, are part of an Armenian family displaced to France after the Armenian genocide. They are stateless refugees and have made the suburb of Belleville in Paris, their home. Maral’s father is a cobbler and owns a small shoe shop hoping to one day pass on his skills to his son.

Missak, on the other hand, has different plans. He is a skilled artist and wants to work as an apprentice at the local print shop while spending most of his time secretly helping the French resistance. As a girl from a fairly conservative family, Maral can’t do much to help her brother, even if she sometimes wishes she could. “Was this to be my lot? Stuck in an apartment knitting or sewing or cooking while waiting for the men to come back from some adventure? It made me want to take the kitchen plates and throw them out the window just to hear them smash into a thousand pieces on the cobblestones below,” she laments.

Easily the smartest in the family, Maral goes through school even with the war progressing all around her, and towards the end of the story, graduates with an offer of admission to one of France’s most prestigious universities.

The Pegorian family’s fate is not unique to Paris or even to Armenians. Their neighbors, the Kacherians (also Armenian) are scraping the barrel to get by as are the many mixed families (including Jewish folks) in the neighborhood. Food is hard to come by — it’s mostly bulgur and turnips that the Pegorians manage to finagle with their ration card. There’s hardly any butter or meat to be had and even onions can be a rare delicacy. Despite the evident sufferings of the citizens during the Occupation, the children somehow manage to be themselves. Maral, in fact, falls in love with Zaven, one of the Kacherian sons, and Missak’s best friend. The two meet surreptitiously and pledge themselves to each other. Yet the best laid plans don’t always come to fruition.

Zaven and his older brother, Barkev, are swept up by the force of history and spend time in a German camp which changes them forever. The war crimes they witness leave permanent scars on their psyches — and ripples from these will eventually touch everyone they know including Maral.

History plays out in more than one way in this touching novel by Nancy Kricorian. With the weight of the Armenian genocide on their shoulders, the Armenian families in All The Light There Was, only want to lie low and not be subject to more tragedies. Maral’s parents have witnessed the horrors of the massacre personally and understandably it defines their life perspective in many subtle ways. When a Jewish family next door is rounded up by the Germans, the Pegorians hide the youngest girl in that family in their own apartment until the child is ready to be shipped to her aunt in Nice.

The Armenians in Maral’s generation might be removed from the immediate horrors of the Armenian genocide but they use the lessons learned from it to know that survival depends on many complicated factors. They are not ready to judge when they see their fellow brethren wear the American or the German uniform in the war.

In the end this story is a coming-of-age tale about Maral, a girl of promise at the novel’s start but who gradually gets worn down as the story moves along. “This is the story of how we lived the war, and how I found my husband,” Maral says at the beginning. The path toward finding her husband is not necessarily the most optimal but of course this is wartime and everyone’s lives are shaped by it. For someone who was fairly strong-willed at the beginning, it is a little frustrating, if understandable, to see Maral give up her education and instead fall into what comes more easily.

All The Light There Was is told through Maral’s voice and her perspective. In one sense, since she doesn’t do much except to bear witness to events that happen around her, this point of view feels limiting at times. The lens is never trained away from Maral and it occasionally gets claustrophobic. Yet it is precisely because the story is told through Maral’s voice, that the reader gets to feel what life was like for everyday citizens in occupied Paris. You realize that even during the worst wars, life can plod along — and even shine through — with grace. The beautiful cover art in this book drives home the point gracefully. Maral and her boyfriend are up front, lost in each other, while the rest of Paris goes on around them. You realize that while teenagers are often self-centered anyway, in times of war, this can be an essential mechanism to get through its many tribulations.

Ultimately the story ends with a ray of hope. “This world is made of dark and light, my girl, and in the darkest times you have to believe the sun will come again, even if you yourself don’t live to see it,” Maral’s father once tells her. As the reader turns the last page, you hope that the sun will indeed come again and shine down on the young and vibrant Armenians.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 12, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Nancy Kricorian
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Armenian history: Skylark Farm by Antonia Aslan The Last Day of War by Judith Claire Mitchell More occupied Paris: The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure

Bibliography:

• Zabelle (1998)
• Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003)
• All the Light There Was (March 2013)

“Before I give you information about the project, let me ask you a personal question,” Manet said. “How do you feel about Jews?”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (DEC 8, 2013)

It is Paris in the spring of 1942. Paris, the glorious “City of Lights” is even more wondrous in the springtime….but not for the French, not in 1942. It is the second year of the victorious Nazi occupation, and the French are struggling to get by. There are economic problems with the payment of the costs of a three-hundred-thousand strong occupying German army, which amounts to twenty million Reichmarks per day; lack of food for French citizens – the Germans seize about 20% of the French food production, which causes severe disruption to the household economy of the French people; the disorganization of transport, except for the railway system which relies on French domestic coal supplies; the Allied blockade, restricting all imports into the country; the extreme shortage of petrol and diesel fuel; (one walks or rides a bike); France has no indigenous oil production and all imports have stopped; labor shortages, particularly in the countryside, due to the large number of French prisoners of war held in Germany. And then there was the Jewish problem.

Approximately 49 concentration camps are in use in France during the occupation, the largest of them at Drancy. In the occupied zone, as of 1942, Jews are required to wear the yellow badge. On the Paris Métro Jews are only allowed to ride in the last carriage. Thirteen thousand one hundred fifty-two Jews residing in the Paris region are victims of a mass arrest by pro Nazi French authorities on 16 and 17 July 1942, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, and are transported to Auschwitz where they are killed.

Parisian Lucien Bernard is a struggling architect, trying to make a name for himself. He is just trying to earn a living, gain some respect in his chosen field and stay alive. He hates the Germans but has little feeling for the plight of the Jews. Since the German occupation, all work has dried up unless it is for the Nazis.

As the book opens he is on his way to an appointment when a Jewish man is gunned down by a German soldier right in front of him. His main concern is that he not be splattered with blood because he has an important appointment with Auguste Manet, a potential client and wants to make a good impression. He also wants to arrive on time.

“Lucien had learned early in his career that architecture is a business as well as an art, and one ought not look at a first job from a new client as a one-shot deal but rather as the first in a series of commissions.”

This job has much potential. “Monsieur Manet had money, old money. He was from a distinguished family that went back generations.” And Manet was in an excellent position to obtain German contracts. Manet offers Lucien two commissions. He cannot take one without the other. One is for a large factory – to design a new Heinkel Aircraft Works, the other is to construct a secret room in which to hide someone. A room that will never be discovered no matter how well a house is searched; rather like the “priest holes” of yore. Lucien needs the money and wants the contracts that this relationship might bring. He accepts.

Lucien’s first hiding place is inside a Doric column. The actual work is carried out by a German named Herzog and another man. Both have worked for Manet for years and are entirely dependable. He begins designing more expertly concealed hiding spaces -behind a painting, within a column, or inside a drainpipe – detecting possibilities invisible to the average eye. But when one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly and the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal, he can no longer deny reality.

Lucien’s Faustian bargain with the Third Reich is central to the plot. His moral dilemma between his art and his humanity leads him to decision making and life threatening choices. The architect is not the hero here. His actions are not heroic. He undertakes each “hidey hole” design project because he also receives generous monetary recompense and is awarded German engineering projects as a part of the bargain. The “heroes” are the individuals – a Catholic priest, a wealthy Jew, a Parisian fashionista and a German soldier, who, despite the risk of certain death, step up and do something/anything to thwart the actions of the Gestapo.

Lucien is a character who changes as the novel moves, but not without struggles and betrayals. What he is doing is very, very dangerous and there is one German who is determined to capture this man who tricks and deceives the Germans.  Lucien may be somewhat detestable in the beginning with his philandering, his off-handed anti-Semitism, and his greed, but he undertakes a monumental metamorphosis which strips the negative influences from his life and allows his true self to shine through. That may sound corny but it is true. In that aspect, The Paris Architect is a beautiful story of change and growth.

Charles Belfoure is an an author and an architect. Because of his architectural background and insight to the human soul and spirit, he has the ability to shape characters the same way he might craft buildings. The architect’s skill of seeing through to the skeleton of a building must have imbued him with the power to reveal the humanity in each of us.

Just a bit of historical information about the book. Mr. Belfoure has stated that he got his idea about the hidey-holes from Elizabethian England. Priest holes or hidey-holes were secluded or isolated places; hideaways. The term was given to hiding places for priests built into many of the principal Catholic houses of England during the period when Catholics were persecuted by law in England, from the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. The effectiveness of priest holes was demonstrated by their success in baffling the exhaustive searches of the priest-hunters. Search-parties would bring with them skilled carpenters and masons and try every possible expedient, from systematic measurements and soundings to the physical tearing down of paneling and pulling up of floors. It was common for a rigorous search to last a week, and for the priest-hunters to go away empty handed, while the object of the search was hidden the whole time within a wall’s thickness of his pursuers. He might be half-starved, cramped, sore with prolonged confinement, and almost afraid to breathe lest the least sound should throw suspicion upon the particular spot where he was immured. Sometimes a priest could die from starvation or by lack of oxygen.

I was immediately immersed in this unusual novel and highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Sourcebooks Landmark (October 8, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Charles Belfoure
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on fiction based on historical Paris: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Bibliography:

• The Paris Architect (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Baltimore Rowhouse (1999)
• Monuments to Money (2005)

“Normally you can’t get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away; but put your conscience in the cage of this paradox, where it can slither and bark but it can’t hurt you, and you can study it for as long as you wish. Most people don’t truly know how they feel about the Holocaust because they’re worried that if they think about it too hard, they’ll find out they don’t feel sad enough about the 6 million dead, but I’m an expert in my own soul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  SEP 13, 2011)

First-time author Ned Beauman really lays it out there in the first chapter of this extraordinary novel, which begins with an imaginary surprise birthday party thrown by Hitler for Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It is an exhilarating, outrageous opening to a book that will in fact take a quite different course. But it is important as a way of establishing the moral parameters (and this IS a moral book) and freeing up an imaginative space in which Beauman can explore some ideas that are normally unapproachable.

Actually, Beauman reminds me of nobody so much as Evelyn Waugh. He writes about the same period (England in the 1930s), he inhabits some of the same milieux (a house party in some noble pile), he shares or even tops Waugh in his outrageous use of absurd humor, and he writes about serious subjects at heart. His debut novel explores the world of British Fascism in the years before WWII. Despite the opening, the German Nazis never make an appearance other than as tutelary deities. In its place is a gaggle of mostly well-connected amateurs, a sort of lunatic fringe of the upper class, pursuing theories of eugenics and a universal world language. Yes, they had their real-life counterparts; Lord Claramore’s family is in the book, the Erskines, somewhat resembles the Mitfords; Evelyn Erskine, the daughter who shows her independence by becoming an atonal composer, is virtually identical to Elizabeth Lutyens; and Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists, makes a cameo appearance, but his 1936 march of supremacy through the largely-Jewish London East End is shown as the farcical debacle it really was.

This period background is viewed from a modern frame. Kevin Broom, the narrator and a collector of Nazi memorabilia, gets caught up in a rivalry which leaves two other collectors dead and Kevin himself in danger of his life. The goal of the rivalry is not at first clear, but it turns upon a letter from Hitler to British scientist Philip Erskine thanking him for an unusual gift, and some as-yet-unspecified connection between Erskine and a diminutive London Jewish boxer named “Sinner” Roach.

Do not look to the story for any great plausibility, though. It propels the plot with exhilarating efficiency, but it is more in tune with the popular adventure stories of the earlier part of the century than with modern expectations of verisimilitude; Kevin’s role model, for instance, is Batman. Waugh used such devices also, but Beauman is very much of his own time in translating Waugh’s absurdity into shock or even disgust. Kevin, for instance, has trimethylaminuria, a genetic disease that makes his bodily secretions smell of rotting fish; there is also strong undercurrent of homosexual violence, which may turn some readers off the book.

Which would be a pity, because the best parts are very good indeed. I am thinking especially of a dinner conversation in New York involving Sinner, two Rabbis, and an American architect, showing how easily some humanitarian endeavors such as mid-century town planning may be perverted into crypto-fascism. Or a brilliant discursion on the quest for a universal language that would unite mankind, discussing real attempts such as Esperanto and Volapük together with the fictional Pangaean, invented by an Erskine ancestor. Or Philip Erskine’s own work with beetles, breeding them for extraordinary aggression and strength, an obvious parallel to the human Eugenics programs of the Nazis for the enhancement the Master Race — though the principle had earlier advocates in both Britain and America. This is a valuable and serious subject for a novelist (it is also examined in Simon Mawer’s excellent Mendel’s Dwarf), and though Beauman chooses an absurd and at times offensive vehicle in which to present it, his obvious intelligence and meticulous linking of his story to real events makes this a far better book than a mere summary might suggest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 39 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ned Beauman blog  and website
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon Second Glance by Jody Picoult

Bibliography:

• Boxer, Beetle (2010; September 2011 in US)
• The Teleportation Accident (February 2013)

“Mittomonai translates roughly as indecent or shameful. I looked it up when I got back to the barracks. But I don’t think I understand what Fumiko meant, not right away at least, not until some time had passed. At first and for a long while afterward, I thought she meant the idea of such a celebration at the scene of such a tragedy, but now I think her meaning was more complicated than that.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 9, 2011)

Only those who fully venerate war can think of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a glorified event. Indeed, many fictional books that are set in post-Hiroshima reconstruction are filled with vivid, colorful and poignant descriptions.

So it comes as a surprise that Michael Knight’s The Typist is such a gentle book. It is devoid of precisely what one might expect in a book set in the wake of World War II: no brow-beating, no heart-wrenching, no intrusive authorial political statements.

At its heart, The Typist is a coming-of-age book. The protagonist, Pfc. Francis Vancleave (Van) has one claim to fame: he types an astounding 95 words a minute. That skill keeps him off the battlefield, where his days are filled with mind-numbing letters of dictation and paperwork. That is, until he comes to the attention of General MacArthur, nicknamed “Bunny.” Bunny conscripts him to keep company with his young son, Arthur, an isolated boy, who enjoys staging figurine battles with his large assortment of toys.

Van is a man who is marginalized by life. As a married man – and we initially know little about his marriage – he does not enter into the “sport” of bedding the panpan girls who “smoked and teased and sent young boys over with indecent propositions.” Unlike his roommate, Clifford, he is a straight arrow, freshly minted from Alabama, more of an observer than a participant. He is able to lose himself in the games of his young charge (would Hannibel outfox Napolean?) and fits in beautifully in Arthur’s isolated world.

There is an authentic simplicity in Michael Knight’s sparse writing, a puissance that might elude a less gifted writer. As Van searches for his own legitimacy, Mr. Knight provides him with the luxury of reaching it at his own pace. This is slow, effortless, luxuriant prose, prose that casts a spell, prose that doesn’t waste a word and refuses to erect artificial roadblocks to the story. As far as comparisons, one work that comes instantly to mind is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. There is as much power in what is not stated as what is.

A subtle theme of football runs through the book – and also in the magnificent story that precedes The Typist, called The Atom Bowl. MacArthur, in shocking disregard of sensibilities, holds a football game to rally spirit in what he dubs the Atom Bowl; “the players trotted out and suddenly the ball was in the air, the Giants kicking to the Bears in the city of Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu, in the occupied nation of Japan.” If there is any doubt of how Michael Knight expects us to read this scene, it is dispelled by the opening story. In it, a young boy interviews his “pawpaw” – the last surviving participant of the Atom Bowl. As his pawpaw relives these “gory days,” the boy asks him, “What about you? Did you ever feel guilty or anything?” The response: “For what?”

This small, quiet novel centering on a rootless man in search for something he only dimly understands packs a disproportionate wallop. By juxtaposing complex characters with an economy of language, Michael Knight has created a compelling meditation of a sliver of history.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Knight
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Boat by Nam Le

Bibliography:

• The Divining Rod (1998; 2010)
• Goodnight, Nobody: Stories (2003)
• Dogfight: And Other Stories (2007)
• The Holiday Season (2007)
• The Typist (August 2010)

“They love one another with an atavistic ferocity, though, it occurs to Babe sitting in the sunporch, these days perhaps they do not like one another. But she is asking too much of them. Friendship, like marriage, is not all of a piece.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 28, 2011)

“War…next to love, has captured the world’s imagination,” said the British lexicographer Eric Partridge in 1914. And indeed it has. in English classes, we rapidly become acquainted with The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom The Bell Tolls, From Here to Eternity, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five…the list goes on and on.

But here’s what we don’t read about: the personal battles that are fought on the home front. We don’t get an upfront-and-personal look at the women behind the men and what war means to them…and to the children they create together.

Next To Love starts out very strong. We meet three childhood friends in Massachusetts – Babe, Millie, and Grace – whose men are on the cusp of going off to World War II. Ms. Feldman deftly juggles their stories and breathes life into their characters. Grace is the beauty who is married to the heir of one of the town’s most illustrious citizens and has a young daughter; Millie is married to Pete, the pharmacist’s son; and Babe is the feisty wrong-side-of-the-tracks gal who is in a committed relationship with an upstanding man who wants to become a teacher.

The period details are handled beautifully. Ellen Feldman summons up an age where instant communication (cell phones, Internet, etc.) did not exist and when lovers wrote their heart out in letters. It’s an age where women were divided into “nice girls” and “tramps” and men kept a stiff upper lip and talked about “honor” and “duty.” And it’s an age when the telegram is feared and one town can suddenly lose several of its beloved American boys overnight.

It’s also a time when there’s a clear divide between men and women. “The husbands speak the language of drills, marches, and officers who don’t know which end is up; the wives speak the dialect of carping landladies, dirty bathrooms and no hot water to wash their hair, and endless spirit-killing games of bridge. Since there is no common tongue between them, they communicate in sex,” writes Ms. Feldman. In this aspect, the book calls to mind another excellent one: Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When The Men Are Gone.

Profound change comes after the war. The novel takes on a lot in a scant 300 pages and the characters I had come to love in the first half begin to feel a little bit like stand-ins as the forces of history flow past. Yet Ms. Feldman’s riveting style keeps the reader in a “what’s next?” mode.

We are at their side as they try to understand the men who have been forever changed by the horrors of war; one of them has what would be called post-traumatic stress disorder today. We see the toll it takes on their young children who can only fantasize about the fathers they have never met. And we are on the sidelines of what is now familiar milestones: the way that black veterans are shuffled aside after the war, unable to participate in the new prosperity; the treatment of women as frivolous things, not worthy of jobs or deep thoughts; the bigotry against Jews, ironically, after a war where six million of them were callously murdered.

Ultimately, the book is focused on female friendship – at turns, courageous, poignant, and fragile. The friendships are not idealized, but rather portrayed to be sustaining, enduring, and nurturing. At its core, it is about survival through life, love, children, war, grief, and resurgence, delivered with just the right amount of drama and intensity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 88 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ellen Feldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	As mentioned above: You Know When The Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon Read our review of Ellen Feldman’s: Scottsboro Rearview Mirror

Bibliography:

• AKA Katherine Walden (1982)
• Conjugal Rites (1986)
• Looking for Love (1990)
• Too Close For Comfort (1994)
• Rearview Mirror (1996)
• God Bless the Child (1998)
• Lucy: A Novel (2003)
• The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (2005)
• Scottsboro (2008)
• Next to Love (July 2011)

“She takes pea pods from her vegetable rack and dumps them on the table. For a while there’s just the snap of the pods, and the neat, percussive sound of peas falling into bowls, and through her open door the scratch and bustle of chickens and the whisper of the countryside. A dark lacquer of sadness seems to spread across the room.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 28, 2011)

The quotation shows Margaret Leroy at her best, describing the ordinary routines of everyday life, in a strongly realized setting, and an acute emotional sensitivity. The place is Guernsey, one of the British Channel Islands nestling off the French coast between the arms of Normandy and Brittany. The time is 1940, when the islands came under German occupation, after being more or less abandoned by the British as indefensible. The sadness comes from the fact that man of this little farm has been one of the few inhabitants killed in the bombing that preceded the invasion. One of the very few, actually, for as the title of the book that Leroy acknowledges in her introduction indicates (The Model Occupation by Madeleine Bunting), the German occupation of Guernsey was marked by civility on both sides and little effective resistance. I have never read a wartime story in which the brutal atrocities that have become a staple of WW2 fiction are largely (but not entirely) absent.

But that “not entirely” is significant; where does one draw the line between cooperation and collaboration? When must one raise one’s head and take a stand? It is a moral grey area that fascinated Leroy, who has re-imagined it in a consistently enjoyable romance novel, though sometimes her greys get a little rose-tinted. The misty period cover jacket showing a shapely woman of the 1940s looking into the sunset framed by exotic blooms absolutely screams Romance! Fortunately there is very little in the actual writing that is anything like as misty-eyed. It also made me think of the cover for Sadie Jones’ Small Wars, which had something of the same romance magazine air. An unfortunate comparison, however, for it reminded me that the Jones novel had a great deal more blood and grit than this one, without losing its feminine focus. I could have done with a bit more of that here. But having said that, I have said the worst; Leroy is a compelling writer and gives much to enjoy.

Leroy’s protagonist, Vivienne de la Mare, English by birth, is unhappily married to a Guernsey Islander. Now, while her husband is off with the army, she must look after her two daughters (Blanche and Millie, ten years apart) and her senile mother-in-law Evelyn. There are three main elements to the story. The first is the ordinary business of parenting: reading bedtime stories to the younger child, guiding the older one’s first forays into dating, fielding the criticisms of a demanding mother-in-law; Leroy handles all this with obvious understanding. The second is specific to the place and time, a curious cocktail of glamor and deprivation. This may well be Leroy’s strongest suit, as she captures both the style of the period and the beauty of the island’s leafy lanes and upland heaths, yet does not stint on the difficulty of making do under wartime conditions. Especially strong is her sense of community, and the way in which the inhabitants of nearby farms and homes rely on one another to get by. We have already seen some of this in my opening quotation; let me add to Vivienne’s description of the countryside near her home:

“I love that sense of going deep, of being enclosed. It’s like the way it feels when you follow the Guernsey lanes down here to our home, in this wet wooded valley of St. Pierre du Bois. The valley seems so safe and cloistered, like a womb. Then, if you walk on, you will go up, up, and out suddenly into the sunlight, where there are cornfields, kestrels, the shine of the sea. Like a birth.”

Then there is the third element, the wartime romance. The empty house next door to Vivienne’s is requisitioned by two German officers and their batmen. One of these, Captain Gunther Lehmann, an architect in civilian life, brings small presents to Vivienne; she refuses at first, but despite herself she falls in love. It is a beautiful oasis in the middle of war, answering a need in both of them, for Gunther is a man of peace trapped in a soldier’s uniform, and a passionate man in a loveless marriage. But of course strains do arrive which pull Vivienne’s loyalties and affections in different directions. Despite the model nature of the occupation as it affects people of her own nationality and class, she becomes aware of the more brutal aspects of the war and will ultimately be forced to make choices. Some of what happens at the end seemed a little implausible; this is, after all, a romance. But within its genre it is sensitive, richly textured, and consistently enjoyable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Voice; Original edition (June 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Leroy
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Yes, My Darling Daughter Postcards from Berlin and Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Bibliography:

• Trust (1999)
• Alysson’s Shoes (2002)
• Postcards from Berlin (2003)
• The River House (2005)
• Yes, My Darling Daughter (2009) (aka The Drowning Girl in UK)
• The Soldier’s Wife (2011) (aka The Collaborator in UK)

Nonfiction:

• Miscarriage (1987)
• Pleasure: the truth about female sexuality (1993)
• Some Girls Do: why women do and don’t make the first move (1997)