The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

The Chilbury Ladies' Choir is not by any means a bad book. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but feel I'd read it all before: small town scandals, war refugees, uncertainty and sacrifice in a small English town. A little too much The Summer Before the War, perhaps, or even The House at Tyneford. I also found it a challenge, especially for the first 100 pages or so, to keep straight the myriad characters and sub-plots. One of them, which appears early and often and is perplexingly central to the novel, involves the switching of babies so that Colonel Winthrop, whose only son and heir was killed in the opening days of the war, can again have an heir. Frankly, I'm still mystified.

Also, I'm tired - and I've complained about this before - of authors using multiple viewpoints expressed through journals, letters, and such to love the story forward. Such writing was used to great effect in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, but now it feels gimmicky. (And, in the case of Chilbury, there are so many characters doing this that, as I said above, just keeping track of everyone and her sister- sometimes quite literally - is a task unto itself.)

On the whole, my complaints are relatively minor and I imagine most readers, at least those who haven't already read a litany of war-in-small-town-England book, would enjoy reading this one.

Three stars.