Love in a Time of War: The best new sweeping, escapist historical fiction book release of the year!: Book 1 (The Three Fry Sisters)

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This is the second novel I've read by this author and again, I am blown away by the descriptive details of the various backdrops as these determined young women face up to the realities of adulthood. I was standing on platform 13 at Clapham Junction on a Friday afternoon in May, just before a Bank Holiday weekend, having taught that week. Jessie, a twin, enlists with the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service and is deployed to Gallipoli where she works on a hospital ship and then to Egypt where she works in a hospital in Alexandria. And Capri is where her mother Christina’s story began – it’s cleverly laced through the story of the sisters, along with the layers of secrets that explain her protectiveness of her daughters and her fervent wish (or maybe that should be vain hope…) that they will all follow a conventional path to marriage and motherhood. Before Covid I ran a 1-week design retreat in Marrakech (I have been working as an interior designer in London for 20 years), but I’ve had to cancel these the past couple of years.

In keeping secrets from her family, I was reminded of the quotation from Marmion by Sir Walter Scott, ‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. My mother’s family lost two young men — my great-uncles John and Alphonsus Edwards — in battles during WWI, and my own grandfather, Thomas Chinn, was gassed with mustard gas and suffered a shrapnel wound which would eventually kill him in 1949. Etta is the flighty one, a fledgling artist caught up with the Bloomsbury set, falling in love with artist Carlo and finding herself alone in Capri with a young child when the war tears him away.Adrienne does a fabulous job of portraying, through these three very different sisters, the spirit of all women who went on to forge new lives for themselves during and after this time of war. When not writing or designing, she can normally be found in the queue at Gatwick heading off somewhere new: she travels all over the world, but most often to her beloved Morocco, which she has been visiting regularly for over ten years. It was long at almost 500 pages and at times it went slow but I was seeing the characters develop more and that worked for me.

Love in a Time of War is the first book in a series of three, about the lives of three English sisters, Celie, Jessie and Etta Fry, during and just after the First World War. Give me something with a well-defined storyline, add some suspense (or spice), and I am a happy reader. Love In A Time Of War is the first in an expected trilogy which follows the lives of the three Fry sisters.

Love in a Time of War” by Adrienne Chinn, new author to this reader was a captivating and wonderful read. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The war enables her to pursue it further and she enlists with the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service. Upon falling in love with Italian artist, Carlo, she follows her heart – and him – to Italy, but when Italy joins the war, she joins her aunt who helps her raise their daughter. The book starts off slowly but it soon picks up pace and there are plenty of things to discovery on their journey.