April’s best reads
Literary editor Sarra Manning falls for a plucky heroine…
Dear Mrs Bird
by AJ Pearce (Picador, £12.99, out 5th April)
I love books set on the Home Front during the Second World War, so I couldn’t wait to read AJ Pearce’s debut novel, Dear Mrs Bird,
but I wasn’t prepared for the truly delightful way its heroine, Emmeline Lake, simply flies off the page.
Living in London during the Blitz, Emmy is Irrepressible, Plucky and Awfully Keen to Become A Lady War Correspondent (she’s also rather fond of capitalising words she feels very strongly about). But when Emmy answers a job advert for a junior at a newspaper, she finds herself working on Women’s Friend
magazine as assistant to its editor and legendary agony aunt, the formidable Henrietta Bird.
Mrs Bird is firmly stuck in Victorian times and won’t reply to letters that feature any kind of unpleasantness, even though her mailbag is full of correspondence from women who are scared and lonely, or who may have had affairs and got themselves in trouble.
Emmy can’t bear to throw the letters away and, keen to offer comfort, she replies to them herself as Mrs Bird. But when tragedy strikes Emmy and her best friend Bunty, Emmy begins to realise that, like the women she’s trying to help, she can’t always be Plucky and Put A Brave Face On Things.
In a similar way to Gail Honeyman’s novel Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Dear Mrs Bird manages to strike that delicate balance between funny and heartbreaking, and in Emmeline Lake, AJ Pearce perfectly captures what it is like to be a young woman excited to be trying out adulthood for the first time, even as life casts a shadow over her.
This novel has so much authentic charm that it could easily pass for a lost 1940s classic recently reissued by a publisher like Persephone or Virago, which is one of the hardest things to achieve in a work of historical fiction. Not a single word or phrase jars or feels out of place in the depiction of London and its citizens; bloody and bowed but not broken.
Dear Mrs Bird is a wonderful, uplifting novel and, like that of its heroine, its breathless, giddy tone has real depth and heart. In the very worst of times, Britain’s ‘finest generation’ would always find the light in the darkness – and this is a message that is still worth remembering when we encounter our own worst times.