Dear Miss Lake (The Emmy Lake Chronicles)
It is July 1944, and the war in Europe is limping towards its inevitable conclusion. The London-based staff of the weekly magazine Woman’s Friend are doing their best to buoy everyone’s spirits and provide practical advice. Journalist Emmy Lake is kept busy writing the “Cheerfully Yours” column and responding to mail from women seeking advice on every topic imaginable. Emmy and her colleagues try hard to align the government’s propaganda requirements with the information they feel women need.
The Woman’s Friend team decides to escape the London bombings and spend the summer working from the relative safety of the countryside. Emmy knows she is lucky, particularly when she achieves a long-held ambition and becomes a Lady War Correspondent, reporting for the magazine on women’s work at home and in Europe. But when her husband is posted back overseas, Emmy suddenly finds herself facing challenges from every corner.
Dear Miss Lake is a gentle, uplifting story about friendship, working together, and maintaining optimism in challenging times. It is about the experience of being left at home to worry and how it is easy to alternate between coping and not. Emmy is surrounded by good people, and she is well-meaning herself—for me there was too much niceness and care from most characters. There is a nod to the value of progressive thinking and the challenges of being confronted by entrenched stereotypes and power, and the book’s themes seem to link the 1940s with the concerns modern people face today.
While this is the fourth book in Pearce’s Emmy Lake series, it also works as a stand-alone novel, although new readers might find it takes time to figure out (and remember) all the characters.
