The Little Shadows

I quite enjoyed The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott which is set in Canada in the very early 20th century.  Laura is widowed and then rejoins the Vaudeville circuit of which she was part before she married.  This time she has her three young daughters to also take on the road.  They are a very close-knit family all with their own special talents.  Their life is difficult times and hard to find a place on the "bill" and then pay their debts.  There are some unscrupulous people to deal with and also kind ones. Each girl Aurora, Clover and Bella will eventually tread different paths as love and opportunity pull them in different directions.  The First World War begins to impact on their all their lives and when a tragedy strikes this close-knit group, they each must decide how to deal with this development.  It was an interesting insight into the people who entertained in the theatre in those days and I enjoyed the development of the characters and how they dealt with their lives.  At 527 pages, it is a big book, but enough to hold the reader to the end. 31/2/5

An End To A War

This memoir An End To A War by Ueno Itsuyoshi (surname first), is by a Japanese war veteran who served in North Borneo at the time of the death marches.  Ueno was recruited towards the end of the war when the recruits were far less fit than those who were in the military at the beginning.  He was not a career soldier and he and others seem to have gathered together to "make up the numbers" as the Japanese faced their defeat.  Ueno and his company faced their own "death march" as they were forced to go across northern Borneo.  They suffered terribly along the way, with many deaths and illness through starvation, malaria and the conditions of the environment in which they found themselves.  His company was not involved with the forced marches of the Allied soldiers and he had very little contact with them.  He was very critical of "armchair generals" who cared so little about the troops on the ground.  His memoir of his time in Borneo is an important document in understanding the War from the Japanese perspective. It reminds us that war is terrible for those on both sides of the conflict. 41/2/5

The Secret Speech

I enjoyed The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith which was set in USSR in 1956 at a time when the country's leader, Khrushchev, had made an "unpublished" speech condemning the Stalinist regime.  Leo Demidov, is a former officer in that regime and his work saw many "innocent" people condemned to the gulags.  He seeks to redeem himself as he and his wife Raisa adopt two sisters, Zoya and Elena, whose parents were murdered.  Zoya is kidnapped by a woman, Fraera,  leading a "terrorist" gang and demands that her husband is returned to her from the gulag.  Leo sets out on this hazardous mission.  There are many violent twists and turns along the way and things are not always what they seem.  The story then goes on to involve the uprising in Hungary.  It was a good thriller with many unexpected twists. 4/5

The Midwife's Confession

I quite liked The Midwife's Confession by Diane Chamberlain.  It is a story about a midwife, Noelle, who dies suddenly and when her friends, Tara and Emerson are going through her effects they discover that Noelle had many secrets. One of her secrets relates to the birth of a baby many years before when through her fault something happens to the baby and she takes action to "remedy" that and serious consequences follow.  The story is mainly told in the first person by the characters Tara, Emerson and Tara's daughter, Grace, as well as Noelle's story in the third person.  So the reader gets a good feel about the characters and their relationship to each other.  It was a good mystery as we don't learn the truth about Noelle's long ago action till late in the story, but I think it was a bit too long. 31/2/5

The Chaperone

I very much enjoyed The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty which is the fictional life story of a woman, Cora, beginning in the 1920s.  She is asked to chaperone a precocious 15-year-old girl, Louise, to New York to join a dance company.  Cora has another reason for wanting to go to New York, to find out more about her origins.  She was brought up in an orphanage and then sent on a train out west where she was adopted off the train.  This was a way for New York to rid itself of its poor children.  Cora learns more than she thought she would while in New York and returns to Kansas a "different" woman.  The reader follows Cora's long life, at the same time learning about the "morality" of the early time and seeing how things change. A good story with interesting angles. 41/2/5.