Monday 15 February 2021

A coincidence worthy of Dickens?

 


I have a little marketing strategy that involves one small marketing activity each day. Each month I tweak them, adding the ones that have been successful to the next month’s and replacing the unproductive ones with something else.

One has been very productive recently.  

So, one day it said “Approach some personal contacts for a review.” I decided to ask members of my National Women’s Group if they would review Clara’s Story. Four volunteered and read the book.  One of them is a former teacher of German.

“A friend of mine is a teacher-trainer for the Steiner schools,” she told me. ”I’ve mentioned the book to him.”

A few days later she contacted me again.  “My friend says that one of his former students is now living in the house at 20 Schellberg Street. Would you like to be put in contact?”

Well, yes.

And so it has happened. I have now exchanged quite a few emails with the family that lives there. The lady that now lives there with her family is the granddaughter of Emil Kühn, who bought the house off Clara and her son Ernst.

Hopefully when we’ve all got over this pandemic and Brexit has settled down we’ll be able to visit Stuttgart and see the house.                 

Sunday 14 February 2021

Fearless Heart by Dawn Knox


Although this is a feel good romance with an upbeat ending the story shows a lot of evidence of careful research by the writer. This is another novel that shows women playing a very active role in war time activities. Here we have details of:

SOE (Special Operations Executive)

The Resistance

How undercover workers were got into and out of France

How people reported in

How the BBC helped convey “personal” messages

What life was like for French civilians?

How the occupying forces operated

The type of war work women could do  

Hunger and deprivation

It is also extremely well written.

Saturday 13 February 2021

The Last Correspondent by Soraya M Lane

 click on image to view on Amazon

This is actually the story of three female war correspondents. One is sacked from her job as reporter on a publication because she has pretended to be a man, but then she moves on to report about women on the home front.  She eventually moves over to France.  Aother is a photographer and blagues her way into all sorts of situations that are in the whole not open to women.  A third turns from being a fashion model to being an editor on a fashion magazine but concentrating on writing about women’s experience of war.

A set of coincidences bring the three women together so the title is a bit of a puzzle; this is actually a story about three war correspondents.

Here we see there women operating in what would normally be a man’s world.

The novel gives us plenty of detail about the Normandy landings and the way war correspondents worked.

The text refers to Martha Gellhorn and in fact opens with a quote from her in a letter to the military authorities in 1944.