Reviews
What Readers Are Saying
Anne James has moved readers who came for the history and stayed for Anne herself. Here is what they had to say.
This is the kind of book that stays with you. Anne’s voice is so honest and unguarded that you forget you are reading fiction. I finished it in two sittings and spent the rest of the week thinking about it.
Patricia Holt
I picked this up expecting a wartime story and got something far more unsettling and far more interesting. The manor house scenes are extraordinary. You feel every bit of Anne’s discomfort and confusion.
Margaret Calloway
“Eileen Vernon writes about class the way it actually operates, through silences and small humiliations and rules nobody explains. Anne is one of the most believable young protagonists I have read in years.”
Susan Fairweather
A chillingly authentic look at the post-war displacement of the British soul. While many authors romanticise the return of the evacuees, this narrative leans into the loss. It lingers long after the final page.
Dorothy Ashby
The Welsh farm scenes at the beginning are so warm and honest that the shift to Wiltshire hits you almost physically. That contrast is what makes this book work. Vernon knows exactly what she is doing.
James Whitfield
I was not prepared for how much this book would affect me. Anne’s relationship with her mother alone is worth reading the whole novel. Complex, painful, and completely believable.
Caroline Pemberton
In the vein of The Go-Between, this story captures the uncomfortable realization of a child seeing the adult world for what it truly is. Anne is a vulnerable yet resilient protagonist whose eyes guide you through a world you would rather not look at directly.
Helen Marsden
It starts as a sweet story about a girl on a farm in Wales, but the moment Anne arrives at the Manor House, everything shifts. The author does a remarkable job of making you feel Anne’s confusion and dawning awareness without ever overstating it.
Robert Kingsley
Historical fiction at its most grounded. No romanticism, no nostalgia. Just a young girl trying to understand a world that operates entirely on terms she was never taught. I found it genuinely difficult to put down.
Frances Dunmore
Vernon has written something that deserves a wide readership. The story is specific to its time and place, but the emotions at the centre of it, abandonment, resilience, the hunger to belong, are completely universal.