Mr. Churchill's Secretary -- Susan Elia MacNeal
This is one of the books my housemate found on her book buying adventure when she was back in the land of cheap books. I'm fairly sure she saw it on the shelf and decided to give it a try based on the title and the blurb.
I am very glad she did. I have found some new friends. The book was a fun read, and the descriptions of daily life in 1940 London were vivid enough to make it feel truly real. Good books do that, they can draw you into not only the story, but the setting. With a good book it is possible for me to get lost in the world of the story, so much so that sometimes I wonder why the people that populate my real life are not the characters when they are talking to me. On more than one occasion while reading this book, I caught myself looking up from the book and wondering why my bedroom looked nothing like the bombed-out streets of London.
Mr. Churchill's Secretary is a good mystery, with some twists and turns. I really can't say it kept me guessing to last page, but that is mainly because I dropped the book and upon retrieving it, accidentally saw one of the clues. I spoiled the mystery for myself, but that did not make it any less enjoyable to read. (I know many people, my housemate included, read the last pages of mysteries first.)
I know the book was historical fiction, and I understand that not everything described in the book is, or needs to be, historically accurate. There are many thing in historical fiction I can overlook that because I know it is fiction, but there were a few things that rankled with me in this book. Firstly, I really disliked the way the author tried to make the characters embrace anachronistic attitudes about alternative lifestyles. I know alternative lifestyles have existed as long as people have, but the author's style of forcing acceptance and/or mainstream normalcy by emphasizing things that would have been hidden at the time was irritating. I do not need a current social justice lecture in my leisure reading, especially when I thought I was reading a historical fiction mystery. But I do need the characters to be products of their time. I'm perfectly willing to suspend belief for the purposes of the story, but the story needs to make sense in its own parameters. Forcing current ideals on otherwise time-appropriate characters makes those characters very hard to believe. I think of the characters as friends, and I am still looking forward to other adventures with them, but the disconnect between their time and this was glaring and definitely made them feel as though they were merely tools, forced to do the author's bidding, not their independent characters of their own.
The other thing that really grated on my nerves was the author tried, and for the most part succeeded, to get snippets of all of Winston Churchill's famous speeches in the text of the book. I know it was war-time and Churchill did many "rally the troops" speeches, but it was not necessary to quote all of them. The point that the main character was a typist for the Mr. Churchill could have been just as easily made without her speaking along with the Prime Minister on the radio.
On the whole it was a good book, and I look forward to the others in the series. Maggie, John, David, and Sarah have become friends and I am anxious to share their next adventures.
One Bear's Opinion: Three Cups of Strong, Black British Tea, without sugar (there's a war on, you know)
Happy Reading Everyone,
Oliver
