Category: #WorldWar1

#Review of Upheaval by David Munro review by Lou – A Rich Tapestry Mixing Fiction and Fact @davidmunroardoc #HistoricalFiction #WorldWars #BetweenWars #Upheaval #DavidMunro #ScottishAuthor

Upheaval
By David Munro

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Upheaval, written by Scottish author David Munro is rather a different, captivating book set in-between the two world wars. It truly captures the attention with its originality in the angle, where a rich, evocative tapestry is woven with fact and fiction giving unique insights into life and challenging, ever changing times. Although it is historical fiction, it has some thought-provoking questions posed that link to present day circumstances in a unique manner.
Check out the blurb and my full review below…

Blurb

Claudine Dubois, a young actress from Paris, is spotted by a German film director and offered a lucrative contract if she moves to Berlin. In the German capital, she meets charming Ernst Vasel, and a relationship develops. It is 1912, and life in the capital is prosperous. However, the Kaiser is power-driven and will embrace war against established nations.
Post-war, Claudine gives birth to a son. Germany has to pay reparations and economic as well as social chaos ensue. With the assistance of America, the German economy improves and its film industry starts to rekindle. With Claus now at school, Claudine attempts to resume her career. Now in her thirties, parts are scarce. Being active, she finds work in a department store. Jobs are aplenty, but underlying social and political issues increase.
In 1929, Germany is again plunged into economic despair. The National Socialists gain momentum and after the Reichstag elections of 1933, impose their policies and tighter their grip. Ernst refuses to abide by their rules and is imprisoned. As Claudine is employed by a Jewish-owned company, she suffers abuse. Claus, now at university, resents the Nazi regime. After Claudine is attacked by Nazi supporters, she and Claus flee to Paris. Whilst there, she is approached by French Secret Service officials who want Claus to resume his studies and act as a spy. With another war looming, his information vital. Claudine is hesitant but agrees.
Claus is sent to Scotland for training, then returns to university. He meets vivacious Helga and they become friends. However, she has been instructed by the SS to determine his validity. After Claus’s contact in Berlin is arrested, Helga alerts Claus. She reveals the truth about herself and feelings for him.

Review

Upheaval is fascinating as it shows what was happening on the “road to war”. It gives, not only a sense of the political sphere and what was going in the far right wing and far left wing, but also socially in the lives of civilians.
The book is also mindful not to sensationalise anything and that’s testament to the writing style and research done by the author.

What there is a real sense of is how Berlin was once offering the good life and a relative calmness, but how chaos and hardship ensues. Munro skilfully depicts a part of life that is rarely shown, which draws you in. 

Readers are initially taken into 1912 where the perceptions of Germany towards the UK are explored and how London was a city to envy and aspire to be like, especially by Berlin. People have aspirations too, even under the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm and life is pretty good. You see this through young actress, Claudine Dubois, who meets a significant man, Ernst Vasel.
From here, is a rich tapestry of characterisation and history, as Claudine moves to hospital duties following the assassination of Duke Franz Ferdinand, which was the catalyst to WW1. The historical fact that appear are accurate and the precision and the way they are woven throughout storytelling on the human level is a rich tapestry that creates imagery and people can learn something from it too or remind themselves of aspects that aren’t talked about so much anymore when we talk about the world wars.

Interestingly is a question that perhaps not many of us think about, who pays the price of war in the socio-economic sense. It also questions the US and why they wanted to help in the war effort. It made my attention turn slightly to their motives in present day to what they are doing with Ukraine and Greenland. As time marches on these are the thought-provoking questions explored in a historical sense by one of the characters as the 1920’s comes into full swing, changing the world again. It shows how the arts and science returned and the new ‘flapper’ fashion came into being. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 is delved into and how it affected Germany. It also delves into how the road to another world war was being paved, even when new politicians come into power, who know war themselves or have heard about it.

It made me think about how it’s too easy to think that war just happens, but the reality is, past and present how there is always a “road” leading to it, full of cause and effect occurrences happening across the globe.

The book never strays too far from what is happening is civilian life, although the political scenes and soldiers are looked at too.
The upheaval people had to endure through the decades is masterfully captured.

I highly recommend upheaval to those who like social or political or war times history. Upheaval has unique, strong storytelling into a period of time that gives insights rarely talked about nor seen.

 

#Review By Lou of The Toffee Factory By Glenda Young @flaming_nora @headlinepg #HistoricalFiction #TheToffeeFactory #WartimeTrilogy

The Toffee Factory
By Glenda Young

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Woman's Hour

The Toffee Factory sees the start of a new trilogy by Glenda Young. I am delighted to bring a blurb and review, thanks to Headline.

The Toffee Factory

Blurb

Discover the engaging new trilogy from the author of THE SIXPENNY ORPHAN, about three women working in a WWI toffee factory in the North-East!

In 1915 three women start work at a toffee factory in the market town of Chester-le-Street, Durham.

Anne works for the enigmatic owner Mr Jack. She is highly efficient and whips Mr Jack’s disorganised office – and Mr Jack himself – into shape. However, behind her business-like façade, Anne hides a heart-breaking secret.

Elsie is feisty, fun and enjoys a good time. However, her gadabout ways get her into trouble when she falls for the wrong man in the sugar-boiling room.

And there’s dependable Hetty, who’s set to marry her boyfriend when he returns from the war. But when Hetty is sent on an errand by the toffee factory boss, her life changes in ways she could never imagine and a whole new world opens up.

The toffee factory girls begin as strangers before forging a close bond of friendship and trust. And, as the war rages on, they help each other cope through the difficult times ahead.

Review

Chester Le Street in Durham is where to find Elsie and Hettie, hard at work in Jack’s toffee factory, wrapping these rich, sweet, chewy confections. There’s also Anne, who is Jack’s secretary. The three women come together and get to know each other, as does the reader.

The sugar boiling room seems to bring about some romance, but unfortunately for Elsie, she usually falls in love with the wrong sort of man.

Dependable Hetty is forever waiting for her husband to return from war, living a predictable life, until she’s sent on an errand and everything changes…

Anne has had a hard life, hidden by her efficient business persona.

The book tells of hardship, friendship and secrets as world war happens all around them. The Toffee Girls, like many books set in this or the second world war eras is a great reminder of how the cogs of industry and creativity used to work in the UK, the employment created within the sweet factories, creating treats for the masses and the lives people had and the resilience they had to grow.

The Toffee Factory Girls brings heart-warming scenes to read as the women all support each other through the hard times of the uncertainties that war brings.

#Extract from Chapter 4 of Whispers Through Time By Melanie Robertson-King @RobertsoKing #ReadingBetweenTheLines #BlogTour

Extract from Whispers Through Time
By Melanie Robertson-King

Today I am delighted to be able to present the blurb and an extract from chapter 4 of Whispers Through Time, thanks to Lynsey at Reading Between The Lines and the author, Melanie Robertson-King. It sounds mysteriously eerie to me.

Whispers Through Time

Blurb

A historic Canadian property becomes the canvas for a tale that spans generations. In 1914, a tragedy unfolded, leaving scars that linger far beyond the passage of time. In 1947, a visionary purchases the haunted remnants, seeking a new beginning for his family, but his young daughter senses a ghost from the far past. In the present, urban explorers unlock the secrets of the past while running a web design company. Photographs and sketches capture the essence of the property, documenting the whispers of spirits from another era. As the explorers navigate the abandoned corridors and forgotten chambers, the photographs unveil subtle anomalies until supernatural phenomena manifest that defy explanation. Amidst the subtle changes in decor and the flickering candle flames frozen in time, the explorers find themselves entangled in a mystery transcending the boundaries of the living and the dead, forcing the urban explorers to confront the unresolved secrets that echo through the corridors of time. Is a structure just that, or can it house remnants of horror, pain and sin? The urban explorers find they must confront the unresolved secrets that echo through the corridors of time.

#Review of Orphanage Girls Come Home By Mary Wood @Authormary @panmacmillan @RandomTTours #TheOrphanageGirlsComeHome

The Orphanage Girls Come Home
By Mary Wood

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Orphanage Girls Come Home has friendship amongst dark themes. Find out more in the blurb and what I thought in my review below.

 

London, 1910
When Amy is chosen to be a part of a programme to resettling displaced children in Canada, her life changes overnight. Her great sadness is having to say goodbye to Ruth and Ellen, the friends who became family to her during the dark days at the orphanage. As she steps on board the ship to Montreal, the promise of a new life lies ahead. But during the long crossing, Amy discovers a terrifying secret.

Canada, 1919
As the decades pass, Amy’s Canadian experience is far from the life she imagined. She always kept Ruth’s address to hand – longing to return to London and reunite with her dear friends. With the world at war, it seems an impossible dream . . .

Review

Life has its challenges for Ruth, she has it tougher than most, even though she then tries to make a new life for herself.
The setting is Bethnal Green in the Edwardian era. The streets are dangerous! She comes across many people when she breaks away from the orphanage, meets some good people, but the police are on the hunt to return her from whence she came, meaning she needs to hide. She knows she needs to try and hold out until she is of a certain age when she can be left alone and all threat of a return to the orphanage has gone. Meanwhile, her friends are on a resettlement programme to start new lives in Montreal and the opportunity isn’t all that’s cracked up to be. You really feel for her, so far away from what she once knew and the friends she had made in Ruth and Ellen.

The Orphanage Girls Come Home isn’t all as sweet and nice as the title sounds. This streets and the orphanage itself has many dark corners within them. The book has some grit in its themes. There’s abuse and more that goes on throughout the book. Throughout the emotional grimness, however there are glimmers of hope as not all people are bad. There are some who care.

Time passes and it is 1919. The First World War is occurring and things change again. This brings a change in thoughts and some focus on Amy, one of Ruth’s friends from decades ago, and her experiences. It brings trepidation and hope that these, one time friends will be reunited. The question is how and when will that be possible and after such a long time, what that would be like, to see someone after such a long time and in a changing world… 

Wood paints the scenes vividly and pulls you into the streets and characters lives to enthrall and show strength through different, sometimes harrowing, life circumstances as well as adding warmth, without it being saccharin.

 

#AuthorInterview By Lou with Viv Fogel – #Author of Imperfect Beginnings @fly_press @VivWynant @kenyon_isabelle #Poetry #WritingCommunity #ReadingCommunity #BlogTour #ImperfectBeginnings

Today I am delighted to present to you my interview/Q&A session with author of Imperfect Beginnings – Viv Fogel. First, many thanks to Viv for agreeing to the interview/Q&A session on my blog and to Fly on the Wall Press for inviting me onto the blog tour.
Viv’s poems are evocative showing war, peace, family and are set in present times and past times. In my blog post today, discover the blurb and then what she has to say as she talks fascinatingly of her inspiration, a particular photo of artwork that features within the book, the importance of poetry, it’s shape and more, as well as where you can purchase the book.
Without further ado, let’s welcome Viv Fogel…

Imperfect Beginnings lays its poems out to rest on uncertain terrain. Visa paperwork deadlines hang in the air. New-borns, torn too early from their mother’s breast, learn to adapt to harsh guardianship.

Belonging and exile are mirrored in the stories of having to leave one’s birthmother―or motherland.

From narrative poems such as ‘My Father Sold Cigarettes To The Nazis’, Fogel takes us on a journey throughout history, spanning ancestry, wartime, adoption and peacetime, as life settles. Family, work, love and the natural world provide purpose, meaning and a sense of coming ‘home’.

  1. What or who inspired you to be a poet and how did this influence your own poetic style? 

    I started off writing and illustrating short stories – to create worlds and characters I could escape into, but then a cousin, (an English student) gave me my first book of illustrated poetry when I was about 16. I didn’t understand them all – but the musicality of the words, the rhythm and the form of the poems, their vibrancy excited me. Here was another kind of language and sound to the rather dreary way we studied poetry at school. (Soon after, aged 16, my first poem was published in Peace News). A year or so later a conversation with a ‘bohemian’ stranger on a plane to Paris, got me interested in ‘kinetic’ poetry, Corso, Ginsberg and the Beat Poets. Aged 18 it was the Liverpool Poets and the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell and later Ralph McTell. Music and poetry are inextricably linked for me.

2. The poems that seem to be set in modern times and then goes into the second world war, before returning to modern times, what inspired you to write it in this pattern for the arc of your storytelling, within your chosen themes? 

An interesting question: themes are not linear or chronological – patterns reoccur and weave in and out, back and forth. And I did have another way of ordering the sequences and sections in the collection, but because of time constraints, this is how it shaped itself.

 3. You have a photo of the Memorial installation ‘Shalekhet’ : fallen leaves at the Jewish Museum, Berlin and a poem beside it. How did you approach writing a poem that reflects the poignancy of the art installation? 

It took me completely by surprise – that’s how powerful the installation was for me. People were encouraged to walk over the floor of metallic mask- like faces – the ‘fallen leaves’ , – and I just could not bring myself to do that. Instead I sat and listened to them clanking, and the clattering sounds and echoes evoked deeply embodied ‘memories’ and images … 

 4. You mention certain people under the titles of some of the poetry, such as Itzaak Weinreich, 1903-1988, Your birth mother – Jennie and also your mother – Henriette and relatives you never met, what emotions did this evoke in you and did it affect how you wrote and what you wrote in those particular poems? 

Strangely no. Obviously there had been processed emotions long before I wrote the poems – but in order to write effectively I need to be able to dis-identify, and step back from those feelings in order to ‘see’ the bigger picture. Thomas Mann spoke about this in his novel Tonio Kröger – how if we are too emmeshed or lost in the emotions we cannot gain the perspective needed for the writing to be truly effective. But yes – there’s a history and a foundation of feeling-responses that inform these poems.

 5. Your poems are sometimes a sombre silence and sometimes noise and movements, even within the placement of the sentences, not always being linear in every poem, was this a conscious decision? 

Yes! The way a poem looks on the page, the spacing, lineation, even the punctuation is deliberate, which dictates the pace and tone of the reading, rather like musical notation. Obviously a poem written on A4 looks different when printed in a book-sized page.  

 6. How important and relevant is reading poetry in today’s society? 

Very! Poetry says things that cannot be said in any other way. It’s immediate and names what cannot always be named with prose or in journalism. The term ‘poetic licence’ exists for a reason. Poetry may not change the world, its politics or politicians – but it can sustain and give hope. Try reading at least one poem a day – to find that space and nourishment!

 
7. What do you hope readers will gain from your poetry and where can people purchase your book? 

I hope readers will be moved in some way by the poetry … if one poem touches one person or resonates – with empathy, or joy, or inspires them to write themselves, or to find their voice, that’s a wonderful benefit. And I really would like my poetry to be accessible to those who are not just poets and would not normally choose to read poetry.

You can purchase the book directly from Fly on the Wall Press online – or better still- order from your local book store, or even your library. And I would welcome any reviews on Goodreads, Waterstones or Amazon.

Many thanks Lou for asking me onto your blog.

To pre-order please go to: https://www.flyonthewallpress.co.uk/product-page/imperfect-beginnings-by-viv-fogel

#Review By Lou of One Moonlit Night By Rachel Hore @Rachelhore @simonschusterUK @TeamBATC @BookMinxSJV #OneMoonlitNight #BlogTour #WW2 #BookRecommendation #BookTwitter #Blogger

One Moonlit Night
By Rachel Hore

Rating: 5 out of 5.

one moonlit night, rachel hore

One Moonlit Night is a rich, beautiful novel set during the war that is easy to get immersed in with its romance, secrets and war… Follow down to the blurb and my full review below.
Firstly, thanks to publisher Simon and Schuster for inviting me to review on the blog tour.

one moonlit night, rachel hore

Blurb

One Moonlit NightThe unmissable new novel from the million-copy Sunday Times bestselling author of A Beautiful Spy

Loyalty and betrayal, hope and despair, One Moonlit Night tells the captivating story of a husband and wife separated by secrets as well as by war.

Accept it, he is dead.
No, it’s not true.
It is. Everyone thinks so except you.

Forced to leave their family home in London after it is bombed, Maddie and her two young daughters take refuge at Knyghton, the beautiful country house in Norfolk where Maddie’s husband Philip spent the summers of his childhood.

But Philip is gone, believed to have been killed in action in northern France. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Maddie refuses to give up hope that she and Philip will some day be reunited.

Arriving at Knyghton, Maddie feels closer to her missing husband, but she soon realises that there’s a reason Philip has never spoken to her about his past. Something happened at Knyghton one summer years before. Something that involved Philip, his cousin Lyle and a mysterious young woman named Flora.

Maddie’s curiosity turns to desperation as she tries to discover the truth, but no one will speak about what happened all those years ago, and no one will reassure her that Philip will ever return to Knyghton.
The extraordinarily powerful new novel from bestselling author Rachel Hore. 

Review

Having enjoyed A Beautiful Spy, it now gives me great pleasure in telling you how good and compelling One Moonlit Night is. It is an eloquently written book, set in the second world war, that has a whirlwind romance to get caught up in before war breaks out and the lovers, now man and wife – Maddie and Phillip are then separated because he has to fight. They built up a family with two daughters, whom he has no choice but to leave behind, as they then seek refuge. It is like that ultimate emotional romance that plays out as glee that two lovers are together in such a romantic fashion, and scenic areas are painted in the minds eye throughout, which all turns to sorrow and into page-turner.

As the war rages on there is tides of emotion as Phillip may or may not be alive. Everyone except from Maddie thinks he is dead. You really feel for Maddie in this situation. It also turns out that she didn’t really know her husband as well as she perhaps thought as there are so many secrets to be uncovered about events that happened years ago that he never talked about.  The complex mystery about the man whom she married starts when a folder belonging to Phillip is handed to her and realises there are certain things that she had no idea about. It means she has to go to Knyghton, in Norfolk, a place where Phillip spent summer-times in. As well as meeting members of his family and the Land Girls, there is also a photograpgh, that poses many questions and further deepens the mystery of secrets that swirls round and compounds in the book, along with love, loyalty and betrayal. There is much intrigue to be sought and many questions to be answered right up until a well thought out ending.

One Moonlit Night blog tour