Favorite Quotes:

 

In wartime, life sped up and was lived in snatches and you had to make the most of what you had, when you had it.

 

My mother says, “experience is what we call the accumulation of our mistakes.”

 

Her cousin was a young soul. Since childhood, Saffy had darted through life like a dragonfly in a summer meadow, landing in pleasant places and, apart from her parents’ tragic deaths which she’d been too young to remember, her way untouched by shadows.

 

Something the war had also taught her was that the truth wasn’t always best. Rather, it was elastic and sometimes you had to lie to save yourself and those you cared about.

 

Family wasn’t always the people you were connected to by blood, but also those who came into your life by chance and stayed by choice.

 

My Review:

 

This was an absorbing, heart-rending, and intriguing dual-timeline and multiple POV narratives between family members in WWII England and modern times. The storylines were original, engaging, well contrived, historically and culturally accurate, and laced with modern-day family tensions and 1940’s wartime dangers, and a sense of impending peril.

Unexpected revelations, family secrets, cultural concerns, clandestine operations, and identity issues were insightfully and thoughtfully explored in both timelines. I cared about the characters and was riddled with curiosity about what was to become of them.

The writing has emotive, perceptive, easy to fall into, and kept a smooth scroll of sharp visuals sparking across my gray matter. Ms. Gilroy is not only an agile storyteller but a wily one full of surprises.