The Railway Girls (Railway Girls #1) by Maisie Thomas
Genre: Historical fiction, Wartime Sagas, WW2
Read: 5th August 2021
Published: 14th July 2020
★★ 2 stars
DESCRIPTION:
The first novel in the wonderful new Railway Girls series, perfect for fans of Nancy Revell and Ellie Dean.
In February, 1922, at the western-most entrance to Victoria Station in Manchester, a massive plaque was unveiled. Beneath a vast tiled map showing the lines of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway network, a series of seven bronze panels recorded the names of the men of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway who gave their lives for King and Country in the Great War - a total of 1,460 names.
In March, 1940, a group of women of varying ages and backgrounds, stand in front of the memorial, ready to do their bit in this new World War...
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Mabel is determined to make a fresh start as a railway girl where no one will know the terrible thing she did and she can put her guilt behind her... Or is she just running away?
Meanwhile Joan will never be as good as her sister, or so her Gran keeps telling her. A new job as a station clerk could be just the thing she needs to forget her troubles at home.
And Dot is further into her forties than she cares to admit. Her beloved sons are away fighting and her husband - well, the less said about him the better. Ratty old sod. She is anxious to become a railway girl just like her dear mam - anything to feel she is supporting the sons she prays for every night.
The three women start off as strangers, but soon form an unbreakable bond that will get them through the toughest of times...
MY REVIEW:
I love historical fiction, especially wartime sagas, and I was excited to discover a new one in THE RAILWAY GIRLS which is the first in a new series by Maisie Thomas. So many books focus on women taking over where the men left off when going off to war as they sign up to do the jobs the men left behind. In this case, it was on the railways. Some of the work was hard going but some of it wasn't too taxing. However, it wasn't the done thing for women to go out to work especially since some men thought women didn't have the brain capacity to undertake anything more than keeping house. Normally this doesn't bother me because it is just how things were at the time, but some of the men I found to be so dismissive that they angered me with their narrow mindedness to the point of bullying. If they had any idea how much work a woman did unpaid in the home looking after their menfolk and families...
THE RAILWAY GIRLS follows three women of varying ages and backgrounds, and their friends, who have taken up jobs to assist in their own ways with the war effort. Mabel is from a family of "new money" who are desperate to maintain their social status when she signs up for work as a railway girl. Her family is not impressed but Mabel is careful to point out that reneging now would shine a negative light on the family, particularly at a time when her father was about to land a major contract. So to make the best of a bad situation her father arranges lodgings for her at a stately home so that she may remain in the social standing to which they have become accustomed.
Then there is Joan, who is the ugly duckling of two sisters orphaned at an early age with the death of both of their parents and having been brought up by their father's mother who is quick to lay any blame for their genes at their mother's feet. Joan is not the favoured sister of their gran either with Letitia holding favour in both looks and intellect whilst Joan remains firmly in the background and almost a skivvy to her gran. But the sisters adore one another and see no favour above the other as their gran does. Joan is also in love with her sister Letitia's boyfriend Steven. When Joan signed up to be a railway girl, their gran was outraged that she had done so behind her back. The sisters always thought that it was usually best to seek confession rather than permission where gran was concerned. Once she'd calmed down, their gran did state that it was probably all that Joan was good for anyway.
The third of the women is the older mother hen in Dot, who was approaching forty six next birthday. At home she had husband Reg who had once loved her and now belittled her with jokes and snipes. Her two grown sons Archie and Harry were married with a child of their own each and were now away fighting the Germans. Their wives, Pammy and Sheila, were as different as chalk and cheese. Pammy was posh and teaching their daughter Genevieve (Jenny) the finer things in life whilst Sheila was slovenly and lazy with her house in utter disarray and a young son in Jimmy who was a bit of a handful. Both women seemed to think nothing of relying on Dot for things which they were quite capable of doing while Dot now had a full time job of her own as well as keeping house to "ratty Reg" when she came home. Dot, it seemed, was everyone's skivvy. My favourite part was when young Jimmy gave all her pots and pans to the rag and bone man when he told the boy that it was for the RAF, and Jimmy had ideas about getting his very own Spitfire out of it. Dot had then chased the tag and bone man up the street and demanded her pots and pans back. It was rather funny to picture.
Aside from these three women are the friends they have made in Lizzie, Alison, Cordelia and Colette in their jobs with London, Midlands and Scotland Railways. From different walks of life, backgrounds and varying social classes each beholden with their own set of family problems, these women aren't afraid of hard work as they all step out of tradition and get stuck into the work they have each been tasked with...regardless of the narrow minded male perspective.
As excited as I was to begin yet another wartime saga series, I was disappointed in this one as I found it to be wholly uninteresting with a complete detachment to the characters. At first I thought it to be the introduction to the series with setting the scene and pace, but after reaching halfway when the pace was still sluggish and feeling no connection to the characters I found myself rethinking my position on this series. Most people say THE RAILWAY GIRLS is slow for the first quarter, but I'd reached halfway and it was still going nowhere fast. And by this point I found I didn't really care for the characters as much as I should have by now.
I really wanted to like THE RAILWAY GIRLS and enjoy my time with them but I just couldn't. Maybe I could revisit them at a later date and try again...but for now, I just spent two days trying to connect with them and their stories and I couldn't. I found the overly descriptive nature of the railways to be uninteresting and although this was set during WW2 there was barely a mention of their loved ones away at war that there was a sort of detachment there also.
I would normally base my recommendation of this type of book to those who enjoy wartime sagas, but as I love those types of books and failed to connect with those in this one, I am not sure how to do that in this case. But generally, if you do enjoy wartime sagas you may well like THE RAILWAY GIRLS.
I would like to thank #MaisieThomas, #Netgalley and #CornerstoneDigital for an ARC of #TheRailwayGirls in exchange for an honest review.
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