Book Blurb:
1940, Kent : Alice King is not brave or daring—she’s happiest finding adventure through the safe pages of books. But times of war demand courage, and as the threat of German invasion looms, a plane crash near her home awakens a strength in Alice she’d long forgotten. Determined to do her part, she finds a role perfectly suited to her experience as a schoolteacher—to help evacuate Britain’s children overseas.
1940, London : Lily Nichols once dreamed of using her mathematical talents for more than tabulating the cost of groceries, but life, and love, charted her a different course. With two lively children and a loving husband, Lily’s humble home is her world, until war tears everything asunder. With her husband gone and bombs raining down, Lily is faced with an impossible keep her son and daughter close, knowing she may not be able to protect them, or enroll them in a risky evacuation scheme, where safety awaits so very far away.
When a Nazi U-boat torpedoes the S. S. Carlisle carrying a ship of children to Canada, a single lifeboat is left adrift in the storm-tossed Atlantic. Alice and Lily, strangers to each other—one on land, the other at sea—will quickly become one another’s very best hope as their lives are fatefully entwined.
My Review: 4.5 stars
The Last Lifeboat by Hazel Gaynor was such an inspiring story about courage, motherhood and perseverance. I’ve read several of Gaynor’s books and have enjoyed them all, but I think this is her best to date.
I’ve read so many novels, from so many angles about WWII, but this one surprised me with a story I knew nothing about. Although many children from London were sent to the countryside, there were others sent by boat to Canada. Who knew?
Naturally, mothers were scared to send their children off but were promised protection from U-boats by the convoys of ships surrounding them. But what if they weren’t protected. And that’s the main gist of the story as one lifeboat is not rescued and their story during eight days at sea.
The book is told from two POVs. One from the woman chaperone stuck on the lifeboat, and the other from a woman whose young child is on the missing lifeboat. The pacing of this book never let up and I just ached for these two women. This is based on a true story that came alive through Gaynor’s writing.
Quotes I liked:
It isn’t so easy, is it, to change who we are by changing where we are?”
“Yes. Books were safe and certain. The world beyond the library walls was anything but.”
“There’s a lot to be said for reading a good book and forgetting about the bloody war for a while.”
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