CBR18 Bingo: Season – The Cazalets are coming into a new season of their lives with the war on, the youngest son Rupert away in France, and new members of the family being born while others are dying.
World War Two is now on, and come crashing into the lives of the Cazalets, a clan of well-off English wood dealers. However, they still have their own domestic dramas to deal with closer at home.
This is the second book in the Cazalet Chronicles- I read the first, which set in the lead up to the war, last year. There is an enormous cast of characters and several family trees to keep track of, but I was impressed that the impressions I formed of everyone from the first book had persisted enough to keep track of things.
There’s been about a year between the setting of this book in the last, but the author gets you up to speed quickly enough. Unlike the last book, which paid about equal attention to the adult and older child members of the family, this one focuses more on the three eldest daughters – Polly, Louise, and Clary. While I enjoyed following their various paths toward adulthood in the stifling atmosphere of wartime Britain, I did wish we got to seem more of the grownups – some of their stories recede to just a passage here and there. But I expect we will see more of them in other books.
It’s a bit hard to describe the appeal of this series, because we are really just following the everyday lives of rather ordinary people, and nothing very extraordinary is happening to them except that they, like nearly everyone in those years, are trying to lead their ordinary lives in extraordinary times. Sometimes the litany of household concerns can get a bit long, but that’s part of that effort.
