You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
jillwishart 's review for:
The Summer Before the War
by Helen Simonson
This is one of the times when I wish Goodreads would implement half-star reviews, because this is more of a 3.5/5 than a 3, I think.
There are a lot of half-considered ideas within this overlong book - the treatment of refugees, a woman's place in society, attitudes towards homosexuality/racism/classism, and how all of these beliefs and opinions may either change during wartime, or may in fact be further reinforced in the name of propriety, even if it means lives are lost unnecessarily. Unfortunately, a lot of these ideas are presented and then somewhat dropped later, particularly in the case of Beatrice and Celeste - Beatrice spends much of the novel struggling to be acknowledged in her own right, as opposed to merely as "someone's wife" or "someone's daughter", but once the war begins, her story is completely abandoned in favour of the men fighting in France, and is resolved in a handful of sentences in the epilogue. All of these issues were and are genuine, but I think the book would have been stronger if Simonson had chosen to focus on just a few of them and executed them well, instead of trying to show everything and somewhat falling short.
The novel suffers from inconsistent pacing - the vast majority of the novel is set during the leadup to the war as the title implies, and spends a lot of time focusing on the petty banalities of daily life and gossip in a small Edwardian English village, whereas the last fifth or so rapidly courses through a few days at the Western Front. This was probably done on purpose to contrast the horrors of war against sleepy village life, but I don't think it was executed as elegantly as it could have been, and made much of the novel a slog to get through.
There are a lot of half-considered ideas within this overlong book - the treatment of refugees, a woman's place in society, attitudes towards homosexuality/racism/classism, and how all of these beliefs and opinions may either change during wartime, or may in fact be further reinforced in the name of propriety, even if it means lives are lost unnecessarily. Unfortunately, a lot of these ideas are presented and then somewhat dropped later, particularly in the case of Beatrice and Celeste - Beatrice spends much of the novel struggling to be acknowledged in her own right, as opposed to merely as "someone's wife" or "someone's daughter", but once the war begins, her story is completely abandoned in favour of the men fighting in France, and is resolved in a handful of sentences in the epilogue. All of these issues were and are genuine, but I think the book would have been stronger if Simonson had chosen to focus on just a few of them and executed them well, instead of trying to show everything and somewhat falling short.
The novel suffers from inconsistent pacing - the vast majority of the novel is set during the leadup to the war as the title implies, and spends a lot of time focusing on the petty banalities of daily life and gossip in a small Edwardian English village, whereas the last fifth or so rapidly courses through a few days at the Western Front. This was probably done on purpose to contrast the horrors of war against sleepy village life, but I don't think it was executed as elegantly as it could have been, and made much of the novel a slog to get through.