Tag: WW2

#BlogTour #BookReview The Woman with the Map by Jan Casey @AriaFiction @rararesources

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The Woman With The MapWelcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Woman with the Map by Jan Casey. It was published as an ebook on 17th March and will be available in paperback on 12th May. My thanks to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Aria for my digital review copy via NetGalley. Do check out the posts by my tour buddies for today, the team at Chick Lit Central, The Page Ladies, Ceri at Ceri’s Little Blog and Helen at Helen Rebecca Reads.

The Woman with the MapAbout the Book

February 1941. The world is at war and Joyce Cooper is doing her bit for the effort. A proud member of the ARP, it is her job to assist the people of Notting Hill when the bombs begin to fall. But as the Blitz takes hold of London, Joyce is called upon to plot the devastation that follows in its wake. Each night she must stand before her map and mark the trail of turmoil inflicted upon the homes and businesses she knows so well.

February 1974. Decades later, from her basement flat Joyce Cooper watches the world go by above her head. This is her haven; the home she has created for herself having had so much taken from her in the war. But now the council is tearing down her block of flats and she’s being forced to leave. Could this chance to start over allow Joyce to let go of the past and step back into her life?

Format: ebook (431 pages)              Publisher: Aria
Publication date: 17th March 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Oh my goodness, did this book put me through the emotional wringer. I’ll freely admit to shedding tears at some points.  Alternating between 1974 and the period of the Second World War, we gradually come to see why the devastating losses Joyce experienced during the war have made her the way she is, reluctant to get close to anyone for fear they may disappear from her life and preferring to live a solitary, self-contained existence following her established routines. Her little basement flat has become her sanctuary, the place that gives her a sense of stability.  Gradually we come to understand just why it is such a wrench for her to leave it.

The details of Joyce’s wartime work, plotting the location of bombs dropped on London during the Blitz, was fascinating. I was struck by the contrast between the chaos in the streets above and the methodical operation of the Report and Control Centre with its forms, log books and detailed procedures that define  the colour of pins to be used to denote the various levels of destruction and casualties, or the precise diameter of the circle to be drawn to identify V1 rockets.

It was impossible to read the descriptions of the horrific damage and loss of life inflicted on London (and other cities) by German bombing raids without thinking of the atrocities being committed in Ukraine at the moment.  As the war continues, Joyce’s experiences reflect those of many Londoners during the Blitz – never knowing whether this moment might be your last, homes damaged beyond repair, people desperately scrabbling in the rubble of bombed-out buildings, finding yourself left with just the clothes you stand up in and reliant upon the kindness of strangers, loved ones injured or literally blown to oblivion.  And it never stops, for year after year. ‘Everyone was hungry; everyone was cold. They all had spots or skin the colour of the pall of smoke that hung over the city and stomach upsets and earaches and missing fingers and swollen joints…’ Although there are snatched moments of happiness they prove transitory. And, just when you think it can’t get any worse for Joyce, it does. (The chapter headings become positively chilling.)

I fell in love with Joyce and if she were my neighbour I’d want to give her a big hug and join her in a cup of tea and a vanilla slice.  Taking the first tentative steps to remove the protective barrier she has built around her takes courage and Joyce proves once again, as she did during the war, that she has it in spades.

The Woman with the Map is one of the most moving books I’ve read for a long time. The parallels with events in Ukraine make it especially poignant and chillingly prophetic. Attending the celebrations at the end of the war, Joyce listens to Winston Churchill proclaiming that in years to come whenever people had their freedom threatened they would look back at the ‘stubborn determination and stoic endurance’ of the British people and say, like them, that they would rather die than be conquered’. Slava Ukraini!

In three words: Moving, authentic, powerful

Try something similar: Where Stands a Winged Sentry by Margaret Kennedy

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Jan CaseyAbout the Author

Jan Casey’s novels explore the themes of how ordinary people are affected by extraordinary events during any period in history, including the present. Jan is fascinated with the courage, adaptability and resilience that people rise to in times of adversity and for which they do not expect pay, praise or commendation. Jan is also interested in writing about the similarities, as opposed to the differences, amongst people and the ways in which experiences and emotions bind humans together.

Jan was born in London but spent her childhood in Southern California. She was a teacher of English and Drama for many years and is now a Learning Supervisor at a college of further education. When she is not working or writing, Jan enjoys yoga, swimming, cooking, walking, reading and spending time with her grandchildren. Before becoming a published author, Jan had short stories and flash fictions published.

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#BookReview These Days by Lucy Caldwell @FaberBooks @ReadersFirst1

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These DaysAbout the Book

Two sisters, four nights, one city.

April, 1941. Belfast has escaped the worst of the war – so far. Over the next two months, it’s going to be destroyed from above, so that people will say, in horror, My God, Belfast is finished.

Many won’t make it through, and no one who does will remain unchanged.

Following the lives of sisters Emma and Audrey – one engaged to be married, the other in a secret relationship with another woman – as they try to survive the horrors of the four nights of bombing which were the Belfast Blitz, These Days is a timeless and heart-breaking novel about living under duress, about family, and about how we try to stay true to ourselves.

Format: Hardback (288 pages)      Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication date: 3rd March 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

These Days is set between April and May 1941, focusing on four days during which Belfast was subjected to intense bombing raids. The book is structured in three parts – The Dockside Raid, The Easter Raid and The Fire Raids. Through the experiences of the Bell family – sisters, Audrey and Emma, their younger brother, Paul, and their mother and father, Phillip and Florence – the author illustrates the impact of the raids on the people of Belfast.

When the novel opens, Belfast has so far escaped the intense bombing experienced by other UK cities so, initially, the concerns of the family are close to home.

Audrey, the eldest daughter, is due to marry Richard, a doctor who works alongside her father Phillip, also a doctor. However, she has started to have doubts about whether her feelings for Richard are strong enough and whether the direction her life is moving in is the right one. ‘I wish, Audrey says, impulsively. I wish – But she doesn’t know what she wishes.’

Emma, a volunteer at a First Aid Post, is attracted to one of the other female volunteers and has taken the first tentative steps towards an intimate relationship, a relationship that would be considered shocking by her family, possibly even by wider society, but which has opened up for her a whole new set of feelings. ‘She hasn’t known, ever, that it is possible to feel so – ardent.’

Although by all appearances happily married, unbeknownst to her husband, Florence secretly continues to pine for her first love, lost in the First World War. ‘How is it, she sometimes thinks, that this is her life […] It isn’t, she hastily thinks, that she’s unhappy, nor ungrateful with her lot; just bemused, she supposes, that this has turned out to be it.’

Everything changes when the bombing raids start, initially targeting the docks but later becoming more indiscriminate in nature.  (Over the night of 4th and 5th May 1941, the so-called Fire Raids, nearly 100,000 incendiary bombs were dropped on Belfast including in residential areas.) The experiences of the Bell family are a microcosm of the impact of the bombing raids on the city: loved ones killed or injured, people desperately searching for missing family or friends, families seeking to be reunited.

The descriptions of the death and destruction inflicted on the city are harrowing but horrifyingly realistic: homes and buildings demolished, people buried beneath rubble, bodies in their hundreds laid out in a makeshift morgue. I found it impossible to read the scenes of the aftermath of the raids and of people fleeing the bomb-damaged city without thinking of the dreadful scenes we are currently witnessing in Ukraine.   ‘Cars, carts, bicycles, perambulators, batch chairs, even children’s bogey-carts, anything with wheels has been pressed into service, loaded with human and material flotsam, leaving the city.’

I found Florence’s compassionate and empathetic response to Phillip’s experiences tending to the injured and dying and the terrible images that are now seared in his memory, particularly moving. ‘It will never go away, she wants to say then. None of it does – the real or the imagined. Once you have seen those images, whether with your eyes or in your mind’s eye, they are etched there – seared into the body. They are there for ever and you can’t pretend otherwise.’

These Days is a compelling, hard-hitting depiction of the realities of war but also an illustration of the resilience of the human spirit, the instinct to rebuild and to carry on, in the words of Emma, come what may.

I received a review copy courtesy of Faber & Faber via Readers First.

In three words: Moving, dramatic, immersive

Try something similar: Blitz Writing: Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time by Inez Holden

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Lucy CaldwellAbout the Author

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes (Faber, 2016) and Intimacies (Faber, 2021). She has twice been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, and has won the Commonwealth Short Story Award (Canada & Europe) and the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Award. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize – for her novel The Meeting Point – and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

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