Although I am about to review two excellent books I have a bugbear I need to share. Not just aimed at these two, but at the saga publishing world in general. Why, oh why, do books featuring grown women have to refer to them as girls? Yes, I know it’s become a shorthand that readers recognise, but it still grates on me. Oh well…
It is particularly the case in point with Maisie Thomas’s The Railway Girls, because one of the most engaging and interesting characters in Dot, who is well into her forties. She is the sort of woman who organises and takes care of everyone to her own detriment, but determined to strike out and help the war effort, through which she is to find a great deal of self respect.
That is the premise of this excellent book; women from different backgrounds who were thrown together in 1940 to help keep the nation’s vital railways running. The challenges they face, the friendships they form and even their romances weave together into an utterly believable tapestry, depicting wartime Manchester as it surely was.
Thomas’s research must have been meticulous but it is the richness of her storytelling that had me hooked. The detailed descriptions fitted so easily into the narrative the pictures were painted as the story moved along, and that is a rare talent. There is quite an extensive cast of characters too; not only Dot, Joan and Mabel, who will be the focus of the series, but other railway workers as well as their families at home.
For a debut novel this is stunning writing, perfectly paced and never rushed, a slow and realistic journey through the phoney war, Dunkirk and into the beginnings of the blitz.
Vicky Beeby’s The Ops Room Girls is equally enjoyable but totally different. Here the story gallops along, making it difficult to put down, and there were places towards the end when my heart was actually thudding.
Again it features three women, but all of them are young and from modest backgrounds although they all join the WAAF for different reasons. This book (also the first in a series) focuses on Evie, a working class girl whose scholarship to an Oxford college was ripped away from her. The characterisation in this book is so good I was feeling for her within the first few pages and really wanted to know where her story was going.
The answer is the operations room of an airfield in West Sussex, where she arrives in the summer of 1940. She makes friends with glamourous former actress Jess and shy May who has been perpetually put down by her father and brothers. All of them are escaping from something but become totally committed to the war effort.
I expected this, and I expected love stories, but what made this book stand out is the mystery that had to be solved as sabotage rears its ugly head on the base. It is a compelling plot strand that certainly kept me turning the pages.
The Railway Girls by Maisie Thomas is published by Arrow and paperbacks and ebooks are available now. The Ops Room Girls by Vicki Beeby will be published as an ebook by Canelo on July 16th but can be ordered beforehand.