https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2024/03/2024038-night-watch-sarah-waters.html ( )

I really hate when I put off writing a review for a book that I truly enjoyed. Once the immediate afterglow has faded and I’ve started on other books, I just can’t summon all the specific thoughts and feelings I had at the time. So I’m afraid this will sound much more tepid than I really felt about it.

Sarah Waters has a real genius for drawing characters and setting scenes and parceling out the information on both, that I hardly minded that absolutely nothing seems to happen, events-wise, over at least the first third of the book. The story has a strange construction – it starts at the end, wallows in the after effects of all the previous years’ events, then works backward so that you find out the events that led to the outcome on the characters and their situations. And of course, there is no resolution, because the characters are not in a happy place at the beginning, which dims your pleasure in their happiness at the end, knowing that the beginning is their future. And that makes so little sense to me writing it now, even though I already read the whole thing and understand it.

But this is a wonderful book for people who like to read moody character studies. I already know that I’m going to listen to it again, and it will be a new experience, because this time I’ll know *why* and *what happened*, and it will be again a different sort of book. I do have one recommendation to prospective readers, though. Start this one in bound format, then do it on audio the second time around. Juanita McMahon’s performance is fantastic and is not to be missed, but the story structure makes it very hard to follow on audio the first time around.
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One of the characters mentions that people‘s pasts are more interesting than their futures, and this book is told with that in mind, introducing the characters after World War II and telling their stories in reverse. I had mixed feelings about this format, but Waters‘ writing is, as always, in top form, her many characters and often bombed late-war London are brought vividly to life. ( )

If you are tired of books about lesbian women where the romantic relationships seem to make the author uneasy, or where such relationships are written as if they belong to creatures of a totally different species from the heterosexual characters and the reader, this might be a good book for you. This book focuses on several women whose lives intersect throughout the course of World War II, a few ambulance drivers in London during the Blitz. along with a few of the women they save, who remain connected with their lives as the war winds down. While this book, as one might expect from the author's other books, is focused on homosexual women in a relationship, the focus is on the relationships between the characters, their motivations, and the ways that gender and the war affect them. And, for readers not looking for romance in their novels, this book does an excellent job of portraying life during the war for those at home in England. ( )

An interesting take on the second world war through the eyes of a few sets of characters who interact in various places. It deals primarily with the love triangle between two women, and also the relationship in prison of two men, and shows them in different time periods, starting off later, so we eventually see how they ended up how they are in the later post-war period. ( )