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A review by tesslangley7727
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
4.0
You know, I really loved this book. It's a slow burner for sure but that just adds to it's beauty and sadness. It centers on the overlapping lives of four main characters during WW2: Kay, Viv, Helen and Duncan and is told backwards. It starts in 1947 and takes us back to 1941 and we get to see how the characters turned into who they are rather than watch them turn as we go. Which, for me, was pretty cool.
I can't write too detailed of a review because of spoilers but I will say that this is very much a book about the subtler effects of the war on individuals and I think that's where a lot of the criticism seems to be coming from about there being 'no real story'. People have these ideas about War Stories, don't they? That they need to be as big and as explosive as the bombs that fall in them. People forget, or aren't aware of, that even during the blitz people were still just trying to be people.
The stand-out characters and story in this book for me were Kay and Viv and without saying too much, theirs is a story, and Kay is a character, that shows us basic human kindness and goodness during a time when humans were being their very worst to each other.
I can't write too detailed of a review because of spoilers but I will say that this is very much a book about the subtler effects of the war on individuals and I think that's where a lot of the criticism seems to be coming from about there being 'no real story'. People have these ideas about War Stories, don't they? That they need to be as big and as explosive as the bombs that fall in them. People forget, or aren't aware of, that even during the blitz people were still just trying to be people.
The stand-out characters and story in this book for me were Kay and Viv and without saying too much, theirs is a story, and Kay is a character, that shows us basic human kindness and goodness during a time when humans were being their very worst to each other.