Historical fiction about two women, two children and the bombing of London in 1944
I received an advance reading copy of this book courtesy of Harry Hartog an embarrassingly long time ago (2016). I have over 200 books in my to-read piles (plural) and I have been making a big effort to chip away at them, but alas also I keep getting more books. Anyway, I finally picked this one up from one of the many stacks of books and read it.
“The Safest Place in London” by Maggie Joel is a historical fiction novel set in London during World War II. Two women from two different socio-economic backgrounds, Nancy and Diana, and their respective three year old daughters, Emily and Abigail, find themselves sheltering in an underground tube station during an air raid.
This is a character-driven story that uses a crisis setting to explore the ways people respond to extreme stress. Nancy and Diana are each fully-realised characters with clear backgrounds and motivations that influence their mothering and responses to the emergency. The actions that they take are fully believable and reveal a lot about class and personality style, and raise a lot of ethical questions.
However, the book includes four separate stories and the other two stories, Nancy’s husband Joe and Diana’s husband Gerald, were not as easy to get invested in. Much of Gerald’s story takes place in North Africa and felt really disconnected from the overall plot. Similarly Joe, despite being much closer to home, has a plotline of near misses and his own battles with his family and conscription that often felt like they were diverting from the main narrative rather than supporting it.
An interesting snapshot of World War II London that could have benefited from a more streamlined plot.
Tinted Edges 