The Summer Before the War Review

I’m on Day Four of studying for the bar exam. At first I thought it wasn’t so bad. Then I made the mistake of looking ahead at the rest of the week, and now I just want to curl up in bed and cry.

Rule number one for bar prep: Don’t look ahead.

Rule number two: Don’t wake up late and then study until midnight in a desperate attempt to stay on top of things. You will very quickly feel like you can’t possibly go on.

The moral of the story, I seriously need to recalibrate my life yesterday.

But enough about the bar.

Last week, before I started all this studying, I read The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson, and I want to talk about it with you.

The Summer Before the War follows a young woman, Beatrice, who moves to a small town in the British countryside in the summer of 1914. Her father has just died, and she has a job teaching Latin at the town’s grammar school. A woman teaches French and another woman teaches literature at the school, but apparently it’s unheard of that a woman would teach Latin. So Beatrice faces a few challenges to actually secure her job, and she’s sucked into the politics of this little town. But then World War I begins, Belgian refugees arrive, and Beatrice’s job becomes the least of anyone’s concerns.

This book was a bit of a departure from the usual for me. As you know, I usually read World War II books. I know very little about World War I beyond what I remember from high school history. I might have enjoyed this book more had I known more about the history, but I’m not sure. And whether I knew the history or not, the book just didn’t work for me that well.

Firstly, I found it to be very slow, with a lot of characters, and far too many tea parties. It wasn’t all bad, certainly. There were some moments that were great fun, and I found all the characters to be distinct and vivid, even though there were a ton of them. The writing was good too. And things did pick up in the last third of the book. By the time I finished, I was invested in the plot and the characters, but unfortunately I found it to be very predictable, and I knew everything that was going to happen before it did. Also, while the book followed multiple characters, it was mainly about Beatrice, but in the last bit, it switched over to another character’s point of view and we sort of lost Beatrice until the very end, and that didn’t really work for me.

In the end, this was an interesting book, but I’m not sure I would recommend it. It just didn’t work for me the way I wanted it to. I do hope to read more World War I books, because now I would like to know more about the time period. So if you have favorite World War I books, recommend away. And if you’ve read The Summer Before the War, I would love to discuss it more with you.