The Shipyard Girls on the Home Front – Nancy Revell

What more can there be to write about a book and a series when I have been with it from the beginning – apart from the obvious: you need to read it and start from the beginning because you will now have ten glorious books to catch up on.

It is 1944 and the year you could stay that the tide turned for the Second World War, but it is also the year that tide turns for many of our Shipyard Girls as well. All those we have grown to know and love are featured, of course as you would expect some more predominantly than others.

Gloria has had some of her dreams come true, when the man she loves returns. Her only wish now is for her to see her sons, both in the Navy and serving the country. The only trouble is whilst, Gloria might have told them about her change of address and work in the local shipyard, she might have forgotten to mention their baby sister, Hope and her father Jack.

Dorothy seems to be smitten with her love Toby, but when a new face arrives in Sunderland, Dorothy’s emotions are all of a flutter and she really doesn’t know what to do anymore. As we see this new relationship develop we can see what is most obvious, but for Dorothy it takes a bit more time.

Rosie is still living on the snippets of information she gets about her husband, Peter. With the demand for the landing craft for the proposed push in the summer to open up another front and move the war to a conclusion, Rosie thinks the quicker they build these vessels the quicker her husband can come home.

But war has a funny way of playing out and when bad news comes for one of the women, it seems that the best they can do is pull together and support each other. You need copious tissues at this point, it was so well written and because I have been invested in this series from the outset I felt I was unable to give comfort to a friend, my heart almost broke with the sadness of it all.

In an ongoing series there are highs and lows and that is certainly the case in this book, luckily the highs are just important as the lows and we get to celebrate marriages and declarations of love. Of course not everything is as it seems, there are still some secrets which are being kept and there are still some who are seeking revenge.

All of that though will need to wait for book eleven.

 

Thank you to the publisher via netgalley for the opportunity to read this book. 

The Shipyard Girls on the Home Front is published ion 18 February.