Emma's Reviews > Home Front Girls

** spoiler alert ** This one was just okay for me. I enjoyed getting to know Rita & Glory slowly through the letter format, the a slow reveal & realizing of who they were, their backgrounds, & their lives. However, the letter format was also my biggest roadblock. I had a hard time suspending disbelief when it came to a few things in this novel but mostly the style of writing overall. I found myself often pausing & thinking, “there’s no way this is how you would handwrite a letter.” Most of it felt like a normal narrative that had been forced into letter format.

By the end, I saw the overarching theme and the “why” of the book more clearly. My three-star issue (along with my letter format beef above) is that I didn’t see it until the end, and when I did, it wasn’t a beautiful culminating “oh wow, I see it!” moment, it was an, “huh I wish I saw that more while I was reading it.” Instead, I found myself about halfway through wondering if I should read the back of the book to remember or figure out what the purpose of the story was because I felt directionless.

What I did enjoy most was Rita, especially her storyline with Roylene. Even though I didn’t connect as emotionally with the book overall as I wish I had, I did find the passages about grief, loss, and moving on to be very poignant. Even Glory’s reflections when she went back to her mother’s house were moving to me, though I spent most of her parts of the book with a twitching eye at her shenanigans. 🙂🙂🙂

As someone who is just okay with the genre anyways, it just didn’t hit the mark for me. 🤷‍♀️ If you are a lover of historical fiction, specifically WWII, I think it’s worth the read (even though I complained a lot). It does offer a look into life as the women who were left behind and what that may have entailed for many as they waited at home.