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lindamarieaustin110159 's review for:
The Secret Book of Flora Lea
by Patti Callahan Henry
This is my third historical fiction read based on WWII’s Operation Pied Piper, the other two being Susan Meissner’s Secrets of a Charmed Life, and Hazel Gaynor’s The Last Lifeboat. I found this one to be a good but lengthy and far-fetched read. After a while the distant connections were a little cumbersome: an American author whose knowing the story of Whisperwood is never clearly explained, a generous American illustrator whose ties to the author are still a mystery to me, and a woman who took a child and created a false narrative that lasted for years.
Hazel’s failure to know her own heart was also a source of frustration. Her feelings for Harry for obvious and yet she was overly reluctant to release the unlikeable Barnaby. I found this most annoying.
The novel alternates chapters between Britain in 1940 when fourteen-year-old Hazel Linden and her younger sister, five-year-old Flora Lea, are removed from their home with their mother in London to Binsey, a small village outside Oxford, and 1960 when a literary find prompts Hazel to further investigate what happened to her younger sister twenty years prior.
The bonds between Hazel and her younger sister are strong and include the sharing of an imagined secret world called Whisperwood hidden from the view of all others. It is this creative fancy that eventually brings them back together.
Hazel’s failure to know her own heart was also a source of frustration. Her feelings for Harry for obvious and yet she was overly reluctant to release the unlikeable Barnaby. I found this most annoying.
The novel alternates chapters between Britain in 1940 when fourteen-year-old Hazel Linden and her younger sister, five-year-old Flora Lea, are removed from their home with their mother in London to Binsey, a small village outside Oxford, and 1960 when a literary find prompts Hazel to further investigate what happened to her younger sister twenty years prior.
The bonds between Hazel and her younger sister are strong and include the sharing of an imagined secret world called Whisperwood hidden from the view of all others. It is this creative fancy that eventually brings them back together.