Review: I have fallen in love with a book. Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Dear reader,
I am writing to tell you that I have fallen in love. That's right. I'm inconveniently and irrecoverably in love. With a book.
Chris Cleave's Everyone Brave is Forgiven is a literary masterpiece. I have never read such prepared and yet natural and fluent and convincing dialogue in my life. The characters are real and irritating and funny. This book will be stamped onto every must-read list. It will become a classic, a movement, a new sensation that will bring about a series and run of mediocrely glum books dragging behind on its tales. Because how can it not?
The story follows the wonderfully blunt and sarcastic Mary North, a feminist icon in her own right, who seems to stand alone as a beacon of hope for the future of England and the liberal world. She befriends Zachary, an African American student suffering from dyslexia when she signs up to join the war effort and is assigned to teaching. What ensues is a love story, a love triangle, but a brilliantly executed true story. Chris Cleave bases his characters and the events that happened on his grandmother and grandfather. Chris's grandmother's fiance died next to her when the picture house was bombed in the Blitz AND his grandfather was assigned to take care of Randolph Churchill during the Siege of Malta. Chris bases his conversations between Alistair and Mary via letter on his grandparents' letters who only met nine times before they married. But the fact that it is semi-biographical brings a really grounded feeling to the story; Alistair and Mary's exchanges of letters are witty and fantastic and intellectual and SO not cliche in absolutely anyway, which is always a fear when producing a war story romance.
What I really loved about this book was that it looks at aspects that have often been brushed over in previous books that have been set during the Second world war, namely the Siege of Malta which is described in all of its arid torture particularly well juxtaposed against the parting gift Tom gave to his best friend Alistair when he went off to war: a jar of very English jam. The minstrel scene which takes place at the Lyceum theatre is also a fantastic representation of what it would have been like to watch in those days and the racism that held this society in its grasp; you felt like a part and particle existing within this era and that is something only a great book does.
As all war romances are, this is a sad novel. Do not read if you are prone to living in your duvet for a number of days after reading about death - I mean it's set in World War Two and it's a love story: there are going to be deaths. But if you love books and powerful writing and reading wonderful, wonderful stories then please read this because even saying how great and beautiful it is does not do it justice.
Warmly and with all of my recommendations,
Natasha Whearity
Everyone Brave is Forgiven is released on 21st April 2016. You can buy a copy here.