Jennifer Ryan dedicates her wonderfully warm debut novel to her grandmother, Eileen Beckley, and the women of the Home Front – whose incredible stories she has woven together into a beautifully life-affirming tale of the power of community spirit in the constant fear of war.
She harnesses the epistolary form to great effect, allowing each of her female protagonists to have their own voice, through their letters and diary entries.
It begins with a funeral and a notice pinned to Chilbury village hall noticeboard stating the village choir will close as ‘all our male voices have gone to war’.
And it ends with an unexpected wedding and a choir of ladies who have banded together to support each other through love and loss, childbirth and a bombing in the village.
Mrs Tilling’s diary entries stand out as the voice of the everywoman, who gradually realises her own power to stand up to the village tyrant, while also smoothing the paths of those around her like Mary Poppins.
Sisters Kitty (13) and Venetia (18) have their own battles, and Ryan writes convincingly as both the wannabe stage singer Kitty through her diary entries, and the femme fatale Venetia, in her warts-and-all letters of conquests to friend Angela in London.
The descriptions of the togetherness of a choir are spot-on, but the only slightly jarring note, in an otherwise perfectly pitched novel, is the volume of dialogue written in letters, without which much of the action would be difficult to convey.
An extremely impressively researched and tender debut.