Review: The Beauty Chorus

[vorvolaka]

Kate Lord Brown – The Beauty Chorus
Series or stand alone: stand alone
Genre: fiction, historical, romance, adventure, World War Two

Reason for reading: I have a passing interest in women’s roles in war after my own grandmother’s involvement in the Rolls Royce factory in Glasgow. The pay was terrible and the skilled women earned less than unskilled men. Being a hardy adopted Glaswegian, my grandmother joined the women’s strike in 1943 for fair pay. They were semi-successful with their endeavour. After being hit with rotten eggs and the like, they returned to work at the plant where wages were now calculated by the machinery and work you were involved with. As far as I know, this agreement was irrespective of the sex of the worker so a woman would earn the same as a man in the same role. Interestingly, the strike was supported by most of the men still working in the factory.

And that is possibly far more than you ever wanted to read about my family history.

Cover: I kind of like it. The woman is looking a bit on the glamorous side but my granny always said that you powdered your nose and put on your lipstick no matter what situation you were in.

Blurb: New Year's Eve, 1940: Evie Chase, the beautiful debutante daughter of a rich and adoring RAF commander, listens wistfully to the swing music drifting out from the ballroom, unable to join in the fun. With bombs falling nightly in London, she is determined that the coming year will bring a lot more than dances, picnics and tennis matches. She is determined to make a difference to the war effort.

2nd January, 1941: Evie curses her fashionable heels as they skid on the frozen ground of her local airfield. She is here to join the ATA, the civilian pilots who ferry Tiger Moths and Spitfires to bases across war-torn Britain. Two other women wait nervously to join up: Stella Grainger, a forlorn young mother who has returned from Singapore without her baby boy and Megan Jones, an idealistic teenager who has never left her Welsh village.

Billeted together in a tiny cottage in a sleepy country village, Evie, Stella and Megan must learn to live and work together. Brave, beautiful and fiercely independent, these women soon move beyond their different backgrounds as they find romance, confront loss, and forge friendships that will last a lifetime.

Verdict: good

Thoughts: This book came along at just the right time for me. A few weeks, heck a few days, earlier and I would have given up on it for its pretty slow start. But it picks up eventually and turns into a rather entertaining romance/adventure story about three women in the Air Transport Auxiliary, the planes they fly and the support, or lack of in some cases, from the men they fly with. It’s not a book for everyone I don’t think. If you are an ATA or WWII enthusiast, I’d probably avoid it as I’m sure it’s full of horrible inaccuracies. I am not an enthusiast however so I could shut my mind off to any of the bits that made me go ‘huh?’

You will notice that ‘romance’ came before ‘adventure’ above. That is because the book does focus rather more on the personal lives of the women rather than the flying and ATA work. And that’s fine, if that’s what you were expecting. I wasn’t, I thought it would be rather more towards their ATA involvement. That is not a criticism; just a small note and I just thought I’d mention it for others.

The novel was a nice mix of fact and fiction. The three main characters of Evie, Stella and Megan are fictional but the author includes real people as well, such as Amy Johnson, a pilot who broke many flying records before joining the ATA, and Pauline Gower, another pilot who was in charge of the women’s section of the ATA. I don’t know much about these two individuals beyond what I’ve researched after reading but the author managed to work them into the novel in a believable way.

I thought the characters of Evie, Stella and Megan were well written. Despite being very different to each other, their friendship rang true to me because their personalities complemented each other. Their back stories were slowly woven into the narrative and I liked the fact that I was constantly finding out about their lives and their secrets. I might not have agreed with some of their decisions, especially when it came to men, but I was rooting for them all the way, particularly when their male counterparts made their lives unnecessarily difficult. Which certain ones did on many occasions. I felt like cheering when they got their comeuppance.

If I was going to pick a fault with the book, I’d choose the ending. It felt rushed and unfinished; there were a lot of questions left unanswered and the war had not yet ended. I do hope the author is planning on revisiting the characters at some point in the future as I would love to know how their stories truly end.

This was a book that I planned to read as a bit of escapism over the course of a few days. However, I learned some things I was previously unaware of (like the fact that the ATA pilots flew with no weapons or radios), which is always a bonus for a nerd like me. I enjoyed spending time with these characters and learning about their lives more than I thought I would, especially after realising it was a wee bit more slanted towards romance than I anticipated. A solid read which may have kick started a bout of war relating reading!