Holly GreenBesprekingen

Not quite as good as the first in this series, but still quite interesting to see the characters develop.

Green's story tells of realistic experiences and events of WWII, focussing on entertainers of the day. Merry is a pianist and director of concerts that take place in theatres such as the one at the end of the Pier in a seaside town, with dedicated artists like Rose, a dancer, magician Felix, and Richard, a singer. When war is declared they find themselves split up in different services. Green uses factual events in the story giving it authenticity and although there is some warfare, the description is not distressing to the reader. It's a gentle story with characters the reader can care about. Good for anyone who likes a wartime story with a dash of romance thrown in. As it's the first in the series "Follies" I look forward to more.

After a year working in WWII Britain supporting the spies in the SOE, Diana Escott Stevens (aka Steve) volunteers to work in France as part of a spy circuit herself.

Enjoyable thriller with lots of suspense as we wait for the inevitable to happen.

You'd think a 350 page long book about a single boat race would be monotonous or atleast get boring in the middle right ?
Not this one !
This book was an absolute pleasure to read. I was invested in Sadie and Cully and the Odyssey right from the start. The chemistry between Sadie and Cully was palpable from the start.
It captured the complexities of a father daughter relationship without delving too much into them ( still don't like her dad or Tanner though )
Goulash and the fuzzy dolls had my heart !!

I'm extremely satisfied. Take a girl smarting from her dad's sudden coldness after their crash during a 265 mile canoe race. He expected her to suck it up even though she needed stitches in her head and had two cracked ribs after slamming into a rock in the darkness. It's a year later and Sadie is bound and determined this time she's going to finish the race. When her older brother switches teams the morning of the race, she's left with a Hobson's Choice-not race, or pair up with John Cullen, her former best friend and current enemy.
What follows is multi-threaded, there's the actual 265 three day grind on the river, complete with alligators. treacherous currents, poisonous snakes, tricky portages, and snags across the river, all even more treacherous at night. There's the emotional journey that starts as hostility, but evolves into Sadie and Cully realizing, not at the same speed, how much of their perception of what took place isn't accurate, and there's the drive to keep going through storms, exhaustion, hallucinations and physical ailments. It's a great blend of adventure, budding romance, and coming of age, and a book that should be added to many libraries.

After a chance meeting with a stranger during an air raid, Gina Franconi, a British girl of Italian descent, is encouraged to join the FANYs, an elite group trained to encipher, transmit, and decipher coded messages to and from Resistance agents in Europe during WWII. Since her father owns a barber shop in Liverpool, she struggles to find acceptance among the other mainly upper middle class recruits. Will she meet the stranger again?

Judging this book club choice by its cover and title, I was afraid this was going to be a rather soppy romance but actually I found it a good light read which kept me turning the pages. As far as I can make out the author had done her homework and I shall certainly read others by her.

This is what it is. I think the problem with this book is that the description on the back of it isn't very clear. To explain, this is apparently a book of a trio now when I picked up the books cheap it seemed okay - all the descriptions mentioned different characters and as someone not aware of the author or the series I just assumed they were all in the same 'world' but unrelated. As it was I picked up this book and started reading only to realise that when it started abruptly the story wasn't going to be told in flashbacks to fill in the blanks, that in actual fact the characters had been introduced earlier.

It was pretty easy to get a jist of what's going on, but hard to feel a connection with any of the characters - perhaps because I missed a key part of their development but perhaps more likely because I just didn't really warm to them. The premise is interesting of a group of people who used to perform together in a show before the war and how their lives have changed, and I found the relationship between Felix and Merry interesting just on the basis of it being a homosexual relationship in the military during WWII and the efforts they had to make in order to hide it. Richard...he was a strange character, at the beginning he's professing his love for Rose, but not wanting to compete with another man he leaves before she can reciprocate and after a daliance with another woman goes to work getting people out of France where he meets back up with another woman he was having a thing with, professing to love her and...yeah, very soap opera like. I don't quite know if we're supposed to have sympathy for him, or hate him or what but...yeah. I will eventually get around to reading the follow up (if I can work out which one it is) to see what happened to them all, but for me it was just okay. I enjoy books set during the war but this was maybe a little too...I don't want to say soapy, but...yeah, maybe a little soapy and there's nothing wrong with that, but maybe I'd have felt it more if I'd read it in the right order.