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Crooked Heart: Library Edition by Lissa…
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Crooked Heart: Library Edition (original 2014; edition 2015)

by Lissa Evans (Author), Karen Cass (Narrator)

Series: Noel Bostock (2)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
5214146,357 (4.07)105
Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. Humor (Fiction.) HTML:

Paper Moon meets the Blitz in this original black comedy, set in World War II England, chronicling an unlikely alliance between a small time con artist and a young orphan evacuee.

When Noel Bostockâ??aged ten, no familyâ??is evacuated from London to escape the Nazi bombardment, he lands in a suburb northwest of the city with Vera Sedgeâ??a thirty-six-year old widow drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how she gets it.

Noel's mourning his godmother Mattie, a former suffragette. Wise beyond his years, raised with a disdain for authority and an eclectic attitude toward education, he has little in common with other children and even less with the impulsive Vee, who hurtles from one self-made crisis to the next. The war's provided unprecedented opportunities for making money, but what Vee needsâ??and what she's never hadâ??is a cool head and the ability to make a plan.

On her own, she's a disaster. With Noel, she's a team.

Together, they cook up a scheme. Crisscrossing the bombed suburbs of London, Vee starts to make a profit and Noel begins to regain his interest in life. But there are plenty of other people making money out of the warâ??and some of them are dangerous. Noel may have been moved to safety, but he isn't actually safe… (more)

Member:ludmillalotaria
Title:Crooked Heart: Library Edition
Authors:Lissa Evans (Author)
Other authors:Karen Cass (Narrator)
Info:Blackstone Audiobooks (2015), Edition: Unabridged
Collections:Read but unowned, Audio
Rating:****
Tags:Fiction, Audiobook, WWII, England, Civilian Life, Borrowed, 2016 Read

Work Information

Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans (2014)

  1. 00
    The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (2wonderY)
    2wonderY: similar premise and also well done
  2. 00
    News of the World by Paulette Jiles (sturlington)
    sturlington: These are both historical novels about the relationship that forms between an orphan and an adult. Both seem like old-fashioned stories, in a good way, and will warm your heart.
  3. 01
    Goblin by Ever Dundas (wandering_star)
    wandering_star: Similar themes - tough young evacuees and how they make a life for themselves.
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» See also 105 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 41 (next | show all)
I loved this sweet novel. An unlikely alliance of a young evacuee during WWII in England winds up with a single mom struggling during war with a useless son and a house bound mother who writes letters to Churchill. Vee is a wonderful character , shady but cares deeply for her family. As it says on the jacket “ Alone she is a disaster, with Noel she is a team. “ They have all kinds of bad luck , poor schemes and unfortunate timing including being caught out during an air raid attack . Vee and Noel are quite irresistible characters ! Loved this book. ( )
  Smits | Feb 2, 2023 |
Crooked Hearts by Lissa Evans is an adorable story about found family that just happens to occur during the Blitz. Both funny and charming, I wasn’t expecting to fall in love with Vee, who is nothing but a walking disaster, which, I think, is part of her charm. While any story during which the Blitz, its damage, and the loss of life and property play a key part could be dark and upsetting, Ms. Evans finds a way to keep the entire story lighthearted. Perhaps it is the fact that Vee is unabashedly a scam artist, or that Noel is too smart for his own good and yet endearingly naive. Together, they make you smile. ( )
  jmchshannon | Oct 14, 2021 |
This was a visit with a small group of slippery characters. They all have damage and are working their angles for reasons that include survival, malice, greed, grief. The start of the Battle of Britain is well drawn with familiar things becoming strange and social systems changing to wartime patterns. I liked the ending although I don't know how the alter ego could have been maintained into the future. ( )
  Je9 | Aug 10, 2021 |
Although this story takes place after Old Baggage I think it was written before. It's really sad at the start to see Noel without Mattie, as I thought Mattie was a wonderful character. I liked this book too, its a warm and funny account of an evacuee (Noel) and the woman he ends up living with once evacuated. During the Blitz they get up to various plots and money making schemes. Its very enjoyable to read and I breezed through it in a few days. ( )
  AlisonSakai | Jul 22, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 41 (next | show all)
In her Orange-longlisted Their Finest Hour and a Half, Evans charted the capricious fortunes of a company making a dodgy propaganda film about Dunkirk. Crooked Heart is a dark comedy, moving between drollery, pathos, farce and harrowing moments of tragic insight; it’s also a grey comedy, situated among backstreet have-nots subsisting hand-to-mouth in a St Albans of stint and grudge....The prologue is a miniature masterpiece of serio-comic writing whose quality renders the more banal main story curiously anticlimactic...But the comedy of Crooked Heart is interestingly diverse and unstable.
 
An odd couple tale, Crooked Heart charts the relationship between a young orphan evacuee, Noel, sent to St Albans during the Second World War to live with Vera Sedge, who’s already struggling to make ends meet caring for her indolent son and mute mother...Evans has a delightful tone, airy and bouncy as a good Victoria sponge but with a perceptive irony and a spattering of caustic details stirred through. It recalls carefully constructed, deceptively light comic novels by the likes of Stella Gibbons and Nancy Mitford.

Crooked Heart is steeped in its historical moment, and Evans’s use of the idiom of the era is particularly convincing....But Evans never lets the period detail overwhelm her story – and, crucially, she doesn’t over-sentimentalise it either....And while the horror of war is tilted at, it’s also often a source of laughter in the dark: the casualty of an air raid is a comically flattened chicken, while serious injury is inflicted by a clumsy ambulance driver carelessly opening a door. It’s a refreshingly crisp approach, that allows moments of genuine pathos to be all the more resonant.
 

» Add other authors

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Evans, Lissaprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Unwin, JoNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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To Kate Anthony and Gaby Chiappe
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PROLOGUE: She was losing words.

CHAPTER 1:Hitler was thumbing his nose from just across the Channel, and London had decided to move the children out again, all the ones who had never gone.
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Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. Humor (Fiction.) HTML:

Paper Moon meets the Blitz in this original black comedy, set in World War II England, chronicling an unlikely alliance between a small time con artist and a young orphan evacuee.

When Noel Bostockâ??aged ten, no familyâ??is evacuated from London to escape the Nazi bombardment, he lands in a suburb northwest of the city with Vera Sedgeâ??a thirty-six-year old widow drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how she gets it.

Noel's mourning his godmother Mattie, a former suffragette. Wise beyond his years, raised with a disdain for authority and an eclectic attitude toward education, he has little in common with other children and even less with the impulsive Vee, who hurtles from one self-made crisis to the next. The war's provided unprecedented opportunities for making money, but what Vee needsâ??and what she's never hadâ??is a cool head and the ability to make a plan.

On her own, she's a disaster. With Noel, she's a team.

Together, they cook up a scheme. Crisscrossing the bombed suburbs of London, Vee starts to make a profit and Noel begins to regain his interest in life. But there are plenty of other people making money out of the warâ??and some of them are dangerous. Noel may have been moved to safety, but he isn't actually safe

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