My goal this year was a triple cannonball. I seemed to have exceeded that.
“He was met by a collective shriek as the brides parted like biblical waves around him.”
A few others have reviewed The Ship of Brides here, but in case you’ve missed it, here’s a plot summary. At the end of World War II, hundreds of women in Australia had married British servicemen and then ended up separated from them during the course of the war. In 1946, these women took airplanes and ships to Great Britain in order to rejoin these men and start their “real lives” as husband and wife. In this case, The Ship of Brides refers to the HMS Victoria, which took 650 women (some pregnant, some very, very young) from Sydney to England — much to the consternation of the crew and captain. Specifically, we follow four girls (Frances, Jean, Maggie and Avice), as well as the Captain (Highfield) and a marine named Nicol.
I really, really liked some sections and characters of this book, and could have done without others completely. Basically, if the whole book had been about Frances, who worked as a nurse during the war but has a deep dark secret (of course) but seemed like a total badass, her romance with Nicol and Maggie (super pregnant former farmgirl with some family troubles) as a sidekick, I would have been thrilled. But the other two women — Avice, a high society bitch and Jean, a fifteen year old wild child — drove me crazy. And the whole thing with the Captain and his nephew and his great love for the boat dragged. More Frances, please!