This book was a quick read at only 287 pages. I finished it in a couple of days, and once I reached about the midway point, I truly didn't want to put it down because it got so good. I will admit that the first thirty percent or so of the book was a little slow, but it was deliberate and lines up with the plot. The audiobook, if you're interested, is 10 hours and 2 minutes long.
This book has a linear timeline with the characters sharing their own backstories as they become relevant through dialogue. It's told in first person through the point of view of the female protagonist, Alice. It's set in an English village on the Cornish Coast in the months leading up to D-Day.
Here's a brief synopsis for you. When Alice washes ashore on the Viscount Jack Trewella's estate after her ship was torpedoed by a German submarine, he takes her in. Alice is a nun who does not want to go back to the convent, so they pretend that she is Jack's Irish cousin. Eventually, Jack lets Alice in on the true purpose his estate serves for the war, inviting her to join their operation. Along the way, they develop feelings for each other, but there are a ton of obstacles to overcome.
To avoid spoilers, skip to the end of this post.
***Spoilers***
Our story begins with the main character, Alice McBride, opening her eyes after washing ashore in Mermaid's Cove. The ship she was traveling on, the Brabantia, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the English Channel. The ship was taking Alice back to Ireland from where she had been stationed as a nun in southern Africa; the only problem is that Alice doesn't want to remain a nun. She hasn't given up her faith, but she can no longer separate herself emotionally from the rest of the world, especially the twins she saved that she's been forbidden from seeing. So when she's found by Jack, Alice seizes the opportunity to start a new life.
Jack is the Viscount Trewella, and the British military is using his family's estate, Penheligan, as an operations base. He agrees to keep Alice's origins a secret, and they pretend that Alice is his cousin from Ireland. To stay at Penheligan, Alice must join in the day-to-day operations, so she takes on a role with the Land Girls who are doing farm-related work on the estate.
In her early days on the estate, Alice meets Merle, a mother who fled Guernsey, an island in the English Channel, with her children just before the Germans began to occupy it. She and Alice become friends, but it's soon revealed that their friendship didn't happen by chance. It was orchestrated by Jack.
Turns out, Jack and Merle are working with the British Special Operations Executive, or SOE, and they want Alice to join the effort. Merle's mission in striking up a friendship with Alice was to see if she could stick to the cover story she and Jack had invented about who she was. Once they determined that she could stick to the lie, they let her in on the true purpose of Penheligan.
Once a month, on the new moon when it's darkest out, Jack poses as a fisherman and ferries agents and supplies across the Channel to occupied France to aid in the Resistance. They also pick up any agents needing out of the country. Often times, those agents are wounded. Alice speaks fluent French and has nursing skills developed while she was a nun so will be an asset on these runs.
Throughout the book up until this point, Alice has been having an internal struggle of morality. She's been looking for a sign that her survival of the ship's sinking had a purpose. So she agrees to join the SOE's cause and soon is an integral part of Jack's smuggling operation, proving invaluable on the missions she's a part of. Eventually, she's brought even further into the fold and joins Merle in receiving and decoding missives from the agents embedded in France.
All of this builds up to their final mission and the most exciting part of the book. The Germans have been systematically finding and destroying Resistance radios, so they come up with a devious plan to get the replacement parts into the country: Alice will pose as a nun and go into France to deliver not only the necessary radio parts but also explosives. While there, Alice is reunited with an agent who managed to escape a prison camp; they trade places so the agent can deliver a map that she managed to steal, but Alice doesn't make it to the docks in time for the evac, so is left behind in France. She stays with the convent that was helping them for weeks until finally Jack comes to her rescue.
I mentioned in the introduction to this review that there is an element of romance between Alice and Jack. It's a slow build-up due to Jack's troubled romantic history and Alice's conflicted feelings on relationships in general due to her years of being a nun. The biggest obstacle they must overcome is Jack's secret child. About 5 years prior, he had a secret romance with a maid who got pregnant. Predictably, Jack didn't believe the baby was his, and they fought. During that fight, the woman fell overboard and drowned. Jack has been blaming himself for her death ever since. He also chooses not to acknowledge the baby due to some misplaced family loyalty. But when the German occupation began spreading into the Channel, he brought the child to his estate, and it doesn't take Alice long to figure out the truth of the boy's parentage. She does manage to convince Jack to do the right thing, but you don't see the actual outcome of that until the final chapter.
The book ends by fast forwarding to one year after Jack rescues Alice from France. They're married, Jack's son is officially recognized as his son, Alice is pregnant, and they're on their way to Africa to adopt a set of twins that Alice rescued while she was there as a nun.
***End Spoilers***
I love when the majority of a historic fiction is based in fact, and this one is mostly historically accurate. The Afterword is worth a read. In it, the author explains much of her inspiration.
In the book, there is a legend tied to the estate and the cove. I didn't mention it in the review because it's not essential to the plot. It's interesting for sure, but I couldn't figure out how to work it into my summary in a way that didn't feel clunky. Essentially, there is a legend that a mermaid lured a man from the village church into the cove never to be seen again. According to the author, this brief anecdote is based on a real legend from an ancient church in a Cornish village called Saint Senara's.
Alice's story is based on a Belgian nun, Marie Louise Habets. Habets served as a nun in the Congo, and, like Alice, decided to leave religious life during World War II. The author does not mention Jack in the afterword, so I can't say that he's based on an actual person, but I can tell you that there was a Jack Trewella who served in the United States Navy during World War II. He died in 2017.
Penheligan Estate is fictional, but its setting is based on a real location -- Trebah Estate and a fishing village named Durgan located between Falmouth and the Helford River, both of which are key locations in the book. Several of the villagers that fill side roles in the story were actual people whose stories can be found in the visitors center at Durgan. Penheligan itself is based on two historic Cornish mansions, Cotehele and Lanhydrock. Both still exist today as National Trusts.
The British SOE and the Women's Land Army (or the Land Girls as I called them) were integral parts of the war effort. And while Jack, Alice, and Merle's story was fictionalized, it was based off of real events. The SOE was smuggling agents and supplies into France ahead of D-Day. The strategy that Jack and Alice used and the route they followed were the exact strategy and route that were used back in 1944.
So final thoughts? If you're a fan of historical fiction and/or stories based on World War II, this book is for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I have all the other Lindsay Jayne Ashford books I've read. She does historical fiction so well. If you've not added her to your TBR list yet, here's your sign to do so right away. I especially recommend The Woman on the Orient Express and Whisper of the Moon Moth. And of course The House at Mermaid's Cove.
No comments:
Post a Comment