The Secret Orphan
Glynis Peters
HarperImpulse
November 9th 2018
eBook
401
English
May 6, 2022 May 10, 2022
Library Love
As the Nazis' relentless bombs fall during the Blitz of Coventry, six-year-old Rose Sherbourne finds herself orphaned and under the guardianship of a Cornish farmer's daughter, Elenor Cardew.
Elenor knows that the only way to protect spirited Rose is to leave the city and make a new life for themselves away from harm. But soon Elenor discovers that Hitler's firestorm is not the only thing she must fear when she learns a devastating secret about Rose...
With Rose's life in imminent danger, Elenor turns to the only person she can trust to keep the deadly secret, heroic Canadian pilot, Jackson St John. And amidst the destruction of war, an unlikely romance blossoms as they find a way to protect the child they have both grown to love...and each other.
About the book
I think I’ve found another genre that I like. Or rather I like the subject, stories between the first and second world wars have always fascinated me and also everything related to the second world war.
I didn’t know that in England before the war they bought gas masks. When I read it, I went back reading the accuracy of what I had just read.
I have always loved reading about the minutes, days and months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki… oh my God “to love” seems like a wrong verb here… I wish these events had never happened, just as I wish September 9 had never happened or that mother nature had stopped on March 11, 2011 and that covid hadn’t developed or that the attack on the independent nation of Ukraine hadn’t happened… but I’ve always been fascinated by these momentous facts. Okay maybe a little less since September 9 and the war in Ukraine is too recent, as well as the covid, but the rest mentioned has always been an object of study on my part. Perhaps because my grandparents actively participated in the Second World War… perhaps because my grandfather was a prisoner in the United States and I could have been born there (thank God it didn’t happen!) and the stories of my aunts are still fresh in my memory. And then WWII was covered in my first big 5th grade exam! Now kids don’t even know what the “fifth grade exam” is. My aunt’s testimony is still there in my memory.
Plus I like it when the main character is a strong woman who doesn’t let men put her down, especially in such dated stories. Although at first it would seem that Eleonor is a weak woman, then it quickly changes and oh boy how I love it when she has to put George in his place.
Anyway, I liked the concept of the book even though some part were obvious and some part kinda boring but overall a pleasant reading.
