‘The Little Wartime Library’ by Kate Thompson

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ they say, but they’re wrong. In these days of careful targeting and marketing, publishers know exactly who they are aiming at. Had this not been a bookgroup read, I would have run a mile, and I’d be all the better for it. At 470 albeit largish-print pages, I complained the whole way through reading this book about its tweeness, its mawkishness and its outright bad writing.

Clara is a young widow living and working in London during WW2. She works, despite the disapproval of her mother and her deceased husband Duncan’s mother, in a temporary library established during the Blitz in the Bethnal Green tube station. This station was the site of a dreadful incident in 1943 when 173 people who (incorrectly) thought they were fleeing an air-raid were crushed in the stairwell leading to the station. The Bethnal Green library in the East End had been bombed, and so a library was established in the disused Tube station. Here she needs to battle her sexist and bombastic boss Mr Pinkerton-Smythe, who disapproves of the availability of romance literature on the shelves, especially amongst working-class people who didn’t deserve library services anyway. She meets a conscientious objector, Billy, who is working as an ambulance driver, although he is sending conflicting messages. Her good-time-gal friend Ruby lives with her mother and violent stepfather Victor, trying to encourage her mother to escape. She is guilt-stricken by the death of her sister in the stairway crush, and looks to alcohol and her work as a way of escaping, too.

The characters are one-dimensional stereotypes, with the ‘goodies’ very very good and the ‘baddies’ very very bad.

Thompson pushes a strong pro-library line (not that there’s anything wrong with that) in this book and the interminable end-chapters and she relishes littering her text with the names of popular books at the time, hoping to appeal perhaps on her own readers’ love of classic 1940s texts and children’s books.

For me, it’s always a red-light when an author has to put pages and pages of acknowledgements and thanks. Four pages of thanks seems particularly excessive. This seemed like The Book That Would Never End with an Author’s Note, a historical note about the true story of the Bethnal Green library and the fight to save it, yet another author’s note about libraries, a select bibliography and her four pages of acknowledgements.

The book is predictable and “emotional and uplifting” as the blurb says, although the only emotion I felt was frustration at wasting good reading time on this bilge. Normally I don’t write such snarky reviews as this one, but I suppose that she has had enough Women’s Weekly Good Read- type sales that my negative review will make no difference at all.

My rating: 3/10

Sourced from: CAE bookgroups. I would never have read it otherwise.