January 24, 2020

What a page-turner this one was. There was so much going on that it has taken me some time to process it and unpack it all. I’ll do my best to share my thoughts here, but there was a lot to take in.

On the surface, it’s a simple tale of a couple who adopts a two-year-old who had been “rescued” from an abusive home. But is it as abusive as the social worker makes it appear? That’s just one of many questions that arise throughout the book.

What secret is the adoptive mom hiding? Who is the mysterious neighbor who insinuates herself into the family’s life? Are the members of the birth family as awful as they appear to be? Who is the real brain of that family?

These (and many more) are answered in their own time. The author does not rush anything in this book and the drawn-out nature builds the tension. I appreciated this, even as it kept me reading into the night.

Another thing that caught my eye right away was the Table of Contents. When I saw that there was a “Glossary of Scottish Slang” (and saw how long it was), I got excited. I figured that nobody would go to that much trouble for just a few words here and there…and I was right.

I thoroughly enjoyed the chapters from the Johnson family point of view. The author chose to write those passages in the full dialect (hence the need for the glossary). I liked this for two main reasons. One, I enjoy “hearing” accents when I read. I am the type of person who will hear a British accent if a book takes place in London, or a Southern accent if the characters live in South Carolina.

Having the accent right there as I read made it so much easier to “hear,” not to mention the detail that went into writing in that manner. I appreciate the time it must have taken to portray the dialect accurately.

Writing those chapters in that manner also illustrated the difference between the two families vying for Bekki/Beckie. The “proper English,” as opposed to the rougher Scottish slang, was stark in the differences, which added to the gaps between the families.

I’m not going to give anything away, because this is definitely one that you will want to read on your own to get the full impact of the twists the author cleverly puts in the story, and there are more than a few of them. This is one book that you will not want to miss!

About Jane Renshaw

As a child, Jane spent a lot of time in elaborate Lego worlds populated by tiny plastic animals and people. Crime levels were high, especially after the Dragon brothers set themselves up as vets and started murdering the animals in their ‘care’. (They got away with it by propping the victims up with Plasticine and pretending they were still alive…)

As an adult, she is still playing in imaginary worlds and putting her characters through hell – but now she can call it ‘writing’ and convince herself that she is doing something sensible. In real life, she has a PhD in genetics and copy-edits scientific and medical journals.Jane is the author of The Sweetest Poison, a crime thriller. WATCH OVER ME will be her first novel published with Inkubator Books.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JaneRenshaw10
Website: https://www.janerenshaw.co.uk/

Being on the historical fiction kick I have been on lately, I was looking forward to reading this book. I thought the premise of two girls from disparate backgrounds meeting and forming in a friendship amidst the horrors of WWII sounded intriguing.

Amazon: http://bit.ly/37m4Dfv
Kobo: http://bit.ly/2NGqxC6
Apple Books: https://apple.co/2TEZKKn
Google Play: http://bit.ly/2udHehs

There were indeed several engaging moments throughout the novel, but overall I felt that the author just skimmed the surface and could have gone a lot deeper into the girls’ experiences. The concept of their meeting as Land Girls is interesting, as I didn’t know much about the program.

Getting to that point, however, was a little rough. The first chapter addresses the need to spirit Jewish children out of Berlin in the wake of Kristallnacht, and the trip made by Frieda and her brother Kurt to escape. That grabbed me right away. But then the author left them to introduce Sandra five years later (1943).

By the time we get back to Frieda in chapter six, it is also 1943, and her experiences of the previous five years are narrative, not action. I found this to be jarring because there were three chapters of Sandra and only one of Frieda to set everything up. It seemed unbalanced as if the author didn’t know where the heft of the story was.

This was my thought throughout the rest of the book as well. I did think it evened out some once the girls “met” in the program, and I was interested as their friendship grew, but the rest of the novel felt like a basic war story of love and loss. I do think the author did convey the dread and then agony felt by families when they received telegrams, and I liked how the girls bonded over their shared experiences.

All in all, this was a decent book but didn’t have as much depth as I would have liked, and I think that could have come at the beginning to set up the dire need to get children to safety out of Germany. It might have set a different tone. That being said, I did learn more about the Land Girls, though, and if I learn something new from a book, it’s a win for me!

AUTHOR BIO

Shirley Dickson was born and grew up in the seaside town of South Shields. She left school at fifteen and can’t remember a time when she didn’t write. She entered her first short story competition in ‘School Friend’ when she was eleven. After Shirley retired from auxiliary nursing, she was able to devote her time to writing. After living in various locations, she settled under the big skies of Northumberland and has lived with her husband in the same house for over forty years. Shirley has three daughters and four grandchildren and likes nothing better than family gatherings.