I highly recommend “The Whalebone Theatre” by Joanna Quinn. I learned of this book when I happened upon the Queen’s Royal Reading Room at www.royalreadingroom.uk. I love historical fiction and books about the United Kingdom.
The story follows the three children, Cristabel, Flossie and Digby, of the Chilcombe Estate from the 1920s to World War II. The Estate is near Dorset in southwest England. The author takes us along as the kids grow up and we learn about their parents, the lifestyle of their parents, the comings and goings of the Estate itself, and of course The Whalebone Theatre.
While the title is a main portion of the book and all characters are well written, several other areas of the book really pulled me in and made me forget that I was in the early 21st century near Chicago Illinois USA. The portion of the book about the war experiences of the kids and the citizens of Paris and France were insightful and gave me a new perspective of World War II. I also found life on the Chilcombe Estate to be the most interesting and the descriptions of the land and sea took me on a trip to southwestern England.
The author is not shy as she honestly shows us the human side of the kids, the parents, the people on the Estate, and pretty much all the characters the kids come in contact with through the time period of the book.
The book has five chapters, and each chapter gets better than the chapter before. I finished the fifth and final chapter in a weekend, the story was that good.
I highly recommend The Whalebone Theatre. Be prepared for a book that will take you away on an adventure to the Chilcombe Estate in England and at the same time pull you into a story about the brutally honest sides of human nature in war time. I plan to look for future book recommendations from the Royal Reading Room.
Me: I am Diane M. Spolar and I live in Willowbrook, Illinois (a suburb outside of Chicago) with my husband, son and cat. I am a CPA by day and a reader by night and on the weekends. I am a lifelong lover of books.
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