A review by lorrainelowereads
Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks

4.0

I’m not ashamed to say I sobbed my way through the last 60 pages of this book. I hadn’t got high expectations for it when I started; the previous Faulks novel I had read didn't do much for me and I haven’t seen the movie version of Charlotte Gray. The book is the story of Charlotte, who is one of the most interesting and best written characters I have come across in a while, as she moves to London from Edinburgh in 1942, so the height of WW2. Her life changes quickly when she falls in love with an RAF pilot who then goes missing in France, and at the same time she gets employed by the secret service to go to France as a messenger and courier. Her plan is to try to find her pilot while she is there but instead she gets swept up in the resistance activities in the small town she is based in. I found Charlotte’s story itself really interesting and the book opened my eyes to Vichy France, which I had never heard of. But the reason I was so traumatised at the end was the secondary story of two young Jewish boys (exactly the same age as my two boys) who were being hidden in the town where Charlotte was living, and whose parents had already been taken by the Gendarmes.....I knew from the beginning these two boys were doomed, and they were, but it was the description of how these two children, plus the hundreds like them without their parents, were treated while in the camps that devastated me........a really tough, but worthwhile read.