suannelaqueur 's review for:

The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson

4.0

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Holy shit, it took me a long time to read this book. It's typically everything I love in a book, being a helpless Anglophile. But I read it the same way I read A Very Long Engagement. Read a little. Put it down. Remember, "Oh yeah, I have to finish that book." Pick it up again, read some more, put it down. Remember, "Oh yeah, my book." I loved it while I was reading it, but when I put it down, I forgot I was reading it. I thought the writing was superb. The tone was all very proper and British and sedate. As it should've been. It never struck a bad note or wavered in pitch. Possibly a male friendship might've been a romance, but of course no one outright says so. Ostensibly those two eccentric women living in the cottage together are lovers but we don't address that. There maybe was a wartime rape, or, as we prefer to say, "a terrible misfortune, dear, but I simply can't receive her." We maintain standards until the last 15% of the book, when I felt Simonson must've rubbed her hands in glee and thought, "At my signal, unleash hell." WHOA!! The last 15% was like a metaphor for how the English institutions of Stiff Upper Lip, good manners, good breeding, pedigree, social class, keeping emotions to yourself, knowing your place, protecting your reputation and no sex, please, must have been completely BLOWN AWAY by the onset of WWI. The last 15% was fucking intense. The only emotion I'd really felt up until that time was anger at the second-class treatment of women. All of a sudden, like the soldiers in the trenches going over the top: horror, outrage, grief, sorrow, happiness, bittersweetness, love. A bombardment of feeling. Raw, gritty, bloody, tender. People in bed, for God's sake! So it was a lopsided read. And I don't know how to rate it, really. What the hell, four stars. Because fuck war.