The Lumberjills
The Lumberjills offers a look at the home front work done by British women during World War II. Restless after making no contribution three years into the war, Berry defies her wealthy parents and joins the Women’s Timber Corps, informally known as the Lumberjills, to cut timber for the war effort. In the course of their dangerous work, Berry and her friends encounter dashing airmen from the nearby station, runaway evacuees mistreated by their foster families, and a pair of village men with wounds both psychic and physical enduring from the previous war.
There are all the elements of a rousing plot here, from Berry’s estrangement from her family to the widowhood and new courtship of one of her companions, with a bombed village and a downed German pilot along the way. But the telling seems superficial, problems too simply and sometimes improbably solved, and the heartbreak brought by war too easily mended. The reader may be disappointed in the uneven period dialogue—these well-bred “girls” swear like 21st-century women, for instance—and I would have liked more period detail, and detail in general. Still, these are likeable characters getting on with it in a changing world, and we root for their success. The abrupt ending suggests that there will be a sequel.
