Book #48 – An Orphan’s Wish

Prompt – A bildungsroman (a coming of age tale – not necessarily for the main character in this instance, but definitely for one of the supporting characters!)

Medium – Book

About the Book – Set in WW2, the book tells the story of Lana Ashwin, a young teacher whose fiancee, Dickie, dies at sea. Her home and village are full of memories of Dickie, and when the opportunity comes for her to be the headmistress of a village school in a little village just outside of Liverpool, she takes it. Whilst there, she gets to know the matron and children of the local Dr Barnardo’s Orphanage, including a young girl who is struggling with the grief of losing both of her parents. Another child, Peter, is the son of a German officer, now working for the British at Bletchley Park. When the German officer comes to visit, Lana feels an instantaneous connection to him, but she is still working through her own feelings of anger towards Germany after the death of Dickie. And then, there is the good-looking local vet, who also seems attracted to Lana…

My Rating – 8/10. Books like this aren’t my usual reading matter, but I have enjoyed reading things I usually wouldn’t in this reading challenge. I read through the book quickly – it had a fairly simple (although it doesn’t look like it with my precis above!) storyline, and the characters fell into three categories – nice, bit rough around the edges but will be nice by the end of the book, horrible. The book was a nice, gentle way to spend the first of my two holiday weekends (I’m going to be getting much more reading done this week!), and it was about one of my favourite periods of history, WW2 – so had a lot to recommend it. It was also recommended by my husband, who, despite his generally thriller/adventure reading tastes, has a soft spot for very soppy romances.

This next paragraph will contain spoilers, so skip if you would like to! There are two intertwined love stories in this book – Carl (the German officer) and Lana, and then Frank (the vet) and Lana. The first love story is the one in the blurb of the book, between Carl and Lana. It comes very suddenly and the characters move from writing a couple of letters each to the other to making outright confessions of love in the space of about 30 pages. I didn’t find it particularly believable and didn’t feel like we really knew enough about Carl as readers to root for him one way or the other. The second love story (between Lana and Frank) was much more slow-burning, more of a friendship to begin, and we got to know Frank really well before anything ‘happened’. I really liked the character of Frank (and was rooting for him and Lana), but in a slightly differently written book, would have enjoyed the whole German/English romance thing to have been explored.

Would I read it again? It’s in the charity shop pile, so probably not – but I would like to read the rest of Molly Green’s Barnardo books.