Tag: World War 1

Book Review: The British Booksellers by Kristy Cambron – a story from World War Two with its roots in the previous war

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

The devastation of Coventry by enemy aircraft during World War II is often described as the Forgotten Blitz. Coventry was targeted because of its munitions factories, but thousands of homes were also destroyed, hundreds of civilians killed and the Cathedral left in ruins..

Kristy Cambron uses this as a background for her novel The British Booksellers, but the story gets going before all that, even before World War I, when we meet two young people: fifteen-year-old Amos Darby the son of a tenant farmer, and twelve-year-old Charlotte Terrington, an earl’s daughter. They have played together for years, and are obviously soulmates, sharing a love of books, Charlotte also being keen on playing the cello, something she’s not allowed to do – it’s unladylike. So far, so Downton Abbey.

As they get older, their friendship deepens, but Charlotte is promised to local gentry, one Will Holt, who’s something of a lad, but determined to have his fair lady. With a war waiting in the wings, the First World War, that is, everything is accelerated and with miscommunications and nobody getting quite the life they had planned, a kind of bitterness settles on Amos’s and Charlotte’s relationship. Jump a couple of decades on, and here we have Charlotte and daughter Eden at their Coventry bookshop, still living at Holt Manor, while across the road Amos lives above his own bookshop, Waverley Novels. They have been not only business rivals but apparently feuding bookshop owners all this time.

But with another war on the go, things are set to be shaken up in more ways than one. The arrival of Jacob Cole, an American solicitor with claims on Eden’s inheritance adds another plot thread and there are suddenly land girls from London to settle in. But Holt Manor’s struggling to pay the bills, so they need all the help they can get. And then there’s the Bltiz.

Men, mustaches, and marching drills.
It was the view for the last weeks Amos had spent at the Army Riding School. That, and the cricket pitch with endless rows of horse lines set to join the cavalry unit of the British Army’s 7th Infantry Division.
Amos still couldn’t get used to it, the required mustache for the mounted brigade scratching his lip every time he tried to blow in his palms and warm bitter-cold hands in the early mornings. And though he expected water and clean razors were scarce at the front, he also knew the military ban on shaving might not be the blessed convenience the soldiers seemed to think. A mustache didn’t give a tight seal to a gas mask. And while a soldier couldn’t question orders from the big brass, it rankled Amos’s insides not being able to think for himself as he always had.

Kristy Cambron writes a great story about love and war, and there’s a lot here to keep you turning the pages. The characters are complex, appealing and developed well. The scenes of war, of bombing and our characters thrown into the maelstrom of it all are exciting. I enjoyed the scenes with Amos more than all the girls mucking in together and comparing notes about clothes and how to cope without regular access to stockings. Personally, I’d be digging out the less glamorous Lisle stockings, as that manor house, the rain and mud sounded miserably cold.

This is a nice enough novel, but a picky reader might find the prose a little American sounding, the descriptions a little lengthy and over-egged. But the story is terrific and worth picking up for a diverting read that has you eager to find out what happens. The British Booksellers is a three-star read from me.

Book Review: The Bookbinder of Jericho by Pip Williams – a war-at-home story set among Oxford’s printing presses

~ Judith ~ Leave a comment

Pip William’s first novel, the inordinately successful The Dictionary of Lost Words was always going to be a tough act to follow. But when The Bookbinder of Jericho came my way I was soon swept up in Peggy’s story – the work she does at the Oxford’s Clarendon Press in the bindery’s folding room with other women. It’s a segregated working environment, the women collating the pages from the printing room, folding them ready for stitching and binding, a man’s job. Just as it’s men who are always the machine operators and compositors, mechanics and readers.

Oxford itself is also segregated along class lines. Peggy and twin sister Maude live on a canal boat, still missing their mother who died several years before. The are ‘town’, the ordinary working folk who live outside the walls that separate the academic inhabitants of Oxford – or ‘gown’. But we’re on the brink of World War I, and things are set to change.

Peggy can’t help trying to read the books they are folding; she’s smart and yearns for a higher education. Her mother was also a reader, and their canal boat is crammed with books and parts of books that didn’t made the grade, But her sister needs her, or so she thinks, and Peggy sticks by her side. Maude is a little fey, her fingers always busy folding even in her spare time, her conversation a parroting of the phrases of others. The arrival of Belgian refugees, and in particularly Lotte, a grief-stricken woman who joins them at the folding bench, shakes up Peggy’s relationship with her sister, challenging her excuses for avoiding change.

I’d been walking past Somerville all my life, imagining what it was like for the women on the other side of the wall. Now, here I was, a little bit of Jericho littering an Oxford quad. I remembered when I first thought of being one of them – I’d been listening when I shouldn’t have been. She’d be well suited to the Oxford High School, my teacher had said. I know that, Ma had replied, but she won’t leave Maude. My teacher persisted. I think she’s bright enough for college. Ma sighed, It’s not always enough, though, is it? I’d thought of the income I could start earning at the Press, the difference it would make. I’d stopped listening

Other characters breeze through the book and rock Peggy’s world. There’s Gwen, the upper class girl she meets when the two volunteer to read to wounded soldiers. Gwen is ‘gown’, but finds Peggy’s world fascinating. Peggy can’t be sure if her friendship’s genuine or is she just a pet project? Then there’s Bastiaan, the badly scarred Belgian soldier Peggy is drawn to during her hospital visits. He would definitely be ‘gown’ if he were at home, studying architecture, but war has a levelling effect and the two meet as equals.

Tilda is the girls’ mother’s great friend, a flamboyant actress who becomes a VAD at the front, her letters revealing the horrific realities of life in the field hospital at Etaples. There’s Rosie in the canal boat ‘next door’, whose son Jack marches off to war with so many of the boys from the Press. We also momentarily meet Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth) when Peggy attends a function for the refugees at Somerville – the women’s college Peggy eyes with longing.

As Peggy’s views of things are challenged by her new acquaintances, the war grinds on, news of horrific battles and casualty lists filtering back to Oxford. The book is divided into parts which roughly equate to a year in the war, and a book from the presses. In the background there’s another battle going on – the battle for women’s rights, the suffrage movement on hold for the duration. This enlivens the conversations Peggy has with Gwen, but it’s hard for Peggy not to feel bitter. The vote for women when it comes will only be for women over thirty and landowning ones at that – the vote by no means universal.

As the plot goes, The Bookbinder of Jericho isn’t exactly riveting reading. Like Peggy’s life, all the action seems to be happening to someone else, somewhere else. Peggy seems to be in a kind of holding pen, waiting. As a reader I found myself waiting too. What makes the book interesting is the world Pip Williams has created. The little enclave in the printing presses of Oxford is well researched and described in detail. Lovingly so. Then there’s Peggy and Maude’s canal boat and life on the water. Everything tucked into corners to make the most of the space. The frugality of their world – apart from paper, which is everywhere.

So The Bookbinder of Jericho gets top marks for characterisation and world building, for bringing history to life. But I did find myself rushing through it to get to ‘the good bits’ rather than savouring it. There’s still a lot to like and even more to think about so I’ll probably read this author again. This novel’s gets three and a half out of five stars from me.