Marriage and Mayhem for the Tobacco Girls (The Tobacco Girls #5) by Lizzie Lane
Genre: Historical fiction, Sagas, Wartime fiction, WW2
Read: 30th July 2022
Published: 3rd August 2022
★★★★★ 5 stars
DESCRIPTION:
War is fleeting, but true love last forever...
May 1944
Hope and excitement is in the air when news breaks of the allied forces landing in Normandy. D Day has arrived. However, the day-to-day struggles for the Tobacco Girls continue.
Carole Thomas wants her old life back. She is burdened with the guilt of being a young single mother and considers having baby Paula adopted, but Maisie Miles will do anything to stop her.
Phyllis Mason having found the love of her life is getting married in Malta to Mick Fairbrother, but will the dangerous legacies of war plague her happy day?
Bridget O’Neill finds herself posted to one of the hospitals receiving the injured from the D-Day landing beaches. Her most fervent hope is that her husband, Lyndon, does not become one of them.
Peace is on the horizon, but will their wishes and dreams win through and bring them a happy ever after?
MY THOUGHTS:
I've been told that this book is the last in the series and I must say I am heartbroken as it is one that I have truly loved and followed from the beginning. Throughout the series we have watched the three women - Bridget, Phyllis and Maisie - who began work at the Wills tobacco factory in Bristol before the war, grow from strength to strength. We have seen a few new additions come and go over the years.
In MARRIAGE AND MAYHEM FOR THE TOBACCO GIRLS, it's May 1944 and the Normandy invasion, known as D-Day, is imminent setting the wheels in motion for the liberation of Europe and the beginning of the end of the war...at long last. But it isn't over yet and many lives will still be lost before victory can be claimed. The effects are felt the world over, and none more so than with the original tobacco girls despite now being scattered over hundreds of miles.
Bridget has moved to London to train as a nurse whilst having secretly married her longtime love, American tobacco plantation heir Lyndon O'Neill. As nursing and marriage are seen as vocations, a woman therefore cannot do both. However, Bridget hopes to keep her marriage secret and her career as a nurse for as long as she can. She maintains contact with her two friends by letter as often as she can sharing a piece of their lives with one another in an otherwise chaotic world. She and Lyndon have a flat in London in which they live when they both have leave but before long, Bridget receives news that her nursing unit is being relocated and all leave has been cancelled. Something big is in the air.
In Malta, Phyllis has found love with Australian reconnaissance photographer, Mick Fairbrother. After believing him to be dead, she was overjoyed to discover he was in fact very much alive and the two go ahead and plan to be married as soon as they can, with a passage back to Britain and their reallocations arranged. After her first rather disastrous marriage, Phyllis knows beyond a doubt that Mick is "the one" and cannot wait to become Mrs Fairbrother and live happily ever after...if they both survive the rest of the war that is. And then on the day of their wedding in sunny Malta, a raid hits sending everything into disarray. Will they get their happily ever after?
While back in Bristol is Maisie. Still working at the tobacco factory no longer a young frightened girl, Maisie has taken young Carole under her wing. At first, the young girl rubbed Maisie up the wrong way but it wasn't long before Maisie saw something of herself in Carole and when Eddie Bridgeman began hanging around her, and knowing Eddie's penchant for young girls, Maisie took it upon herself to look out for her. Which is just as well since she came acropper with the sleazy colleague who claimed his wife was ill and when Carole went around to deliver some flowers for her, she got more than she bargained for. Especially when it resulted in a pregnancy and thus the birth of a baby daughter she named Paula. In the wake of her experience and societal attitude, Carole understandably is not coping with motherhood very well...which is therefore leading her to make a somewhat drastic decision. And when Maisie finds out, she is livid.
But life in Bristol, and the world over, goes on despite the war. Maisie has continued to write to Sid, the young man she once stepped out with many years ago before he went off to war and is now locked up in a Japanese POW camp. Lyndon is now flying with the RAF leaving Bridget fretting he'll fly over enemy territory. And Mick does what Mick does which ultimately left Phyllis bereft and worrying for his safety. Is it too late for any of them to have their happily ever afters?
Meanwhile, something else awaits one of the three women back in Bristol which has the potential to change their life...but not before a terrible sadness.
I thoroughly enjoyed MARRIAGE AND MAYHEM FOR THE TOBACCO GIRLS and would hate for this to be the last in the series though things were tied up satisfactorily enough for it to be the end. Even so, I will miss the girls I have come to know and love over the last couple of years since this wonderful series began. While it is the fifth book of the series, it can be read as a standalone, as each book can suffice as such with enough background information given to keep you up to date and not lost in the slightest. However, I do recommend reading them from the start as you too can watch each of the women grow throughout their trials and turmoils they each face.
I cannot speak highly enough of this series and this book particularly is one of the best of the five books. Thoroughly recommended.
I would like to thank #LizzieLane, #Netgalley, #BoldwoodBooks and #RachelsRandomResources for an ARC of #MarriageAndMayhemForTheTobaccoGirls in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Working jobs she's hated purely to keep a roof over her family’s head and a meal on the table, she then discovered writing. Encouraged by an American writer friend and when a time came there were no jobs and no other option, she took the plunge. She is now the author of over 50 books, a number of which have been bestsellers. As a Bristolian, many of her family worked in the cigarette and cigar factories, inspiring her new saga series The Tobacco Girls.
Up until six years ago her home (and that of her late husband) was a 46ft sailing yacht named Sarabande Serene, sailing into the Mediterranean. So besides being a successful author Lizzie can read navigation charts and react swiftly in a storm.
Lizzie is now landlocked in a town close to the city of Bath.
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