By all rights, I should have loved this book. I enjoy reading fiction set during the Second World War, and I thought that the plot sounded interesting. And the book was okay, but it wasn't nearly as engaging as I'd hoped.

I really didn't care about any of the main characters. They all seemed flat, dull, and uninspired. There were a couple of moments when I felt a spark of interest, but those moments were few and far between. ( )

good, a few stars ( )

This book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize back in 2007, which is why it appeared on my reading horizon. Every year, a bunch of friends and I buy and share around the Booker Prize shortlist, plus any longlisted books that happen to be conveniently already owned.

It deals with three parallel and sometimes quite separate stories: Esther Evans, the welsh girl of the title, who is a young woman living with her father in a small Welsh village near a POW internment camp at the end of WW2; Karsten Simmering, a young German soldier at the camp; and Joseph Rotheram, a German of Jewish descent who fled the Nazis and ends up working for the British government interrogating German spies and, of course, POWs.

I do have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and knocked it off in pretty much a weekend (plus a day either end). I can see why it didn't make the shortlist for the Booker - it was nothing exceptional writing or plot-wise - but I was mightily entertained, and turned the pages very happily, soaking up the story.

It was good seeing World War 2 from a different point of view - German POWs and the Welsh, which was a nice change from The Blitz or an American viewpoint. I got the feeling that it was very well researched as well, it had that ring of verisimilitude to the details.

I did get some of the minor male characters a bit muddled, I don't think they were always well enough differentiated. (Or I was just terminally vague while reading it.) And the overall plot did seem rather familiar - I knew where it was going for the most part, even given its unusual setting. But I did enjoy myself while reading it, which isn't something one can always say about a Booker book. ( )

Learned some interesting things about life in the Welsh hills, and a bit more about WWII. Intriguing story concept. Not a wasted read, but the characters and pacing just didn’t grab me. ( )

An entertaining and intriguing WWII novel set in Wales. It does a nice job of juxtaposing the Welsh-English antipathies against the Nazis versus the World aggression.
Pub life in the Welsh village is well and realistically represented as the social focal point of the villagers, as the far-off war slowly marches by, that is, until a POW camp is built and filled just over and down the hill from our Welsh girl, Esther’s family farm. She is an endearing character, longing for something more than the village life, until the war is brought home to her with the arrival of this POW camp, along with a city boy sent down to avoid the bombing in London, and living on her father’s farm with them.
There are three story threads, two of which dovetail into a touching humanistic story. Suffice to say the imprisoned German POW and the local Welsh village girl manage to connect, via the London boy and despite fences and cultural differences, in a way that is both touching and believable. The story also brings to the fore the concept of how all soldiers can be animals, whether they are on your side or not.
The third plotline simply fleshes out the setting more than being specifically relevant to the whole. This involves a young British officer, who is sent to determine whether Rudolph Hess, who is being carefully guarded in Wales also, is in fact still in his right mind. It felt somewhat extraneous to the main story, yet had some amusing moments.
Overall an enjoyable read, though not as pithy as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, but definitely in the same genre.
MMT10/09 ( )