Just finished this wonderful book. My eyes are still red from all my tears, and I just know it is going to stay with me for a long time. I am not being very brave at all about it.
Frances Liardet can write. We Must Be Brave is beautiful, studied and full of emotion. It spans fitty years or so, but concentrates on the key times for the story in the 1940s and 1970s. All of the characters are flawed yet written with sensitivity and warmth. I loved them all. It is a long book, but I didn't want to put it down and I wish I hadn't read it yet so that I can start it all over again.
I highly recommend this thoughtful and moving book.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to read and review #WeMustbeBrave #NetGalley

Ellen is a young married woman living in a village near Southampton during the WWII. There's been a bombing raid on Southampton and buses have carried people to the village from Southampton for safety. Ellen finds a young girl, Pamela, on the bus without anyone with her. She takes care of her initially until they can reunite her with her mother, but the arrangement becomes more long term when they discover her mother died in the raid and her father hasn't been around for years. The love Ellen has for Pamela and their close bond is described beautifully and is the best thing about this book. The story starts strongly and I loved reading Ellen's backstory as well but the plot seems to fizzle out halfway through and doesn't amount to much afterwards. In later life Ellen helps another young girl at the local school and I hoped that this plot-line would rejuvenate the story but it didn't seem to. I did enjoy the book overall.

Genuinely poignant and a fresh take on the evacuee story. It appears very well researched too and rings true

Tough subject matter. It is not an easy read and at times it is quite challenging. However, saying that it is worth persevering with it. This book is based on war however it looks at aspects of war that is not often talked or written about how it affects families, people, relationships the things that are often forgotten.
It is a thinking book- meaning it certainly gets you thinking during and after you have read it.
With all that Frances Liardet has still achieved a beautifully written novel.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Harper Collins UK for giving me the opportunity to read ’We Must be Brave’ in exchange for my unbiased opinion

This book was not an easy read. I expected something like a "typical" war story, about a child. In a way I have got what I expected, but this book is nothing of a typical war story. It is a story of people and relationships, a story of love and suffering, a story so full of feelings that it leaves you impressed long after you finished it.
The style of the book is quite full absorbing and not really easy to read. I was sometimes missing some information, what caused some confusion, even though the information was there later in the book. I loved Ellen as a character and consider her being verywell and relistically depicted. Her suffering and her life was so near to me throughout the boook that I consider her being a longtime friend, I would not like to miss any more.
It impressed me very much and I would recommend it highly!

When did you last have a really proper cry reading a novel? As far as I’m concerned it happens rarely. However, ‘We Must Be Brave’ had me sobbing several times over during the course of the narrative. The story begins in December 1940 when young housewife, Ellen, fosters five year old Pamela, an abandoned evacuee. It transpires that Pamela’s mother has been killed in a bomb blast. After a disastrous attempt at placing evacuee Pamela elsewhere, Ellen and her husband Selwyn foster the child who proves to be intelligent and quirky and who eventually settles to look upon Ellen as a quasi-mother. There is nothing sentimental in the depiction of this relationship. Author Frances Liardet understands that anyone who has been through Pamela’s experience will not be an easy child, yet Ellen is devoted to her, not least because she knows what it feels like to be displaced and disgraced.
Over the course of the novel we learn about Ellen’s childhood and appreciate why Pamela is so important to her. Liardet paints a very moving picture of extreme poverty without sensationalising it in any way. One can feel the hunger pangs and the bone-chilling cold of a 1930s winter during which Ellen has to resort to sleeping under a ‘mouse-saturated carpet’ laid on top of her bedding for extra warmth. The only hope of survival is given through the occasional acts of kindness from struggling neighbours.
Eventually ‘orphan’ Pamela is claimed and the parting between Ellen and her foster daughter is incredibly moving. The author represents Pamela’s partial understanding of her move to Ireland to live with her kind and caring extended family extremely well. At first she is curious and keen, yet we soon understand that this is mainly because she thinks that Ellen will be coming with her. As the whole truth gradually sinks in we see Pamela’s fear, hurt and anger in full. It is a wholly convincing depiction of a child in utter turmoil.
Post WWII, we learn of the bereft Ellen’s feelings through a series of letters to Pamela that she writes but never posts. We also learn ‘what happens next’ as Ellen lives through the second half of the twentieth century. It’s understandable that Liardet also feels compelled to show the reader what happens to all of the secondary characters as we follow Ellen through the decades: Ellen’s husband, Selwyn, her friend Lucy, and the eccentric Lady Brock and her gardener William Kennet, especially as not all of their relationships with Ellen are as transparent as assumed at first. English village life is also very effectively depicted in an unromantic manner, acknowledging both hardships and improvements over the course of the twentieth century as well as recognising that important traditional aspects have been lost. However, nothing matches the emotional punch of Ellen and Pamela’s war-years bond, and it is for this stand-out depiction that the novel should be read first and foremost, and why I am awarding it ‘5 stars’. ‘We Must Be Brave’ shows us a great deal about love and loss, joy and pain and reminds us that these experiences are frequently linked. Perhaps we must be brave because there is no other better reaction when the unbearable happens.
My thanks to NetGalley and 4th Estate (Harper Collins) for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

A beautifully written book. This would make a great read for a woman's reading group. Although fiction, I presume, this could easily be an account of true life taking place in England during WW2. It gives a view of how life in an English village has evolved and how one off encounters can change and influence a whole life time and generation.

What a brilliant book! I loved the dilemmas that the story evoked, and I could totally see how Ellen felt when she rescued Pamela from the back of the bus. The characters are beautifully written, real people that you could meet in your local town or village. The descriptions of the chaos of the war and the bombing really brought home to me how it must have felt to experience that and how easily things could go wrong. Tangled relationships beautifully illustrated weave a fantastic and memorable story. Well worth reading!

What a moving book! I loved the characters of Ellen and Pamela and thought over all this story had a very profound message

A powerful story of love and loss set against the backdrop of the challenges of WWII.

I immediately warmed to Ellen and Pamela and was rooting for a happy ending. At times I thought that Ellen should show more of the strength she demonstrated when taking in Pamela against her husband’s wishes.

This book definitely has three clear stages to it and without giving too much away I did feel that the middle section was a little sombre - I wanted to give Ellen a good shake and get her to DO something about the situation she found herself in.

Despite this, I continued with the book - with tears towards the end - and found it an interesting and thought-provoking read, with an absolutely beautiful cover.

4*, still thinking about this now. Different times and all that, but it does make you wonder how you might have acted in similar circumstances.

I'm not sure that my review will do this book justice. The story is brilliant in it's simplicity, nothing fast paced or even remotely racy or sensational, just a really well told tale. A wonderful use of words, beautifully descriptive scene setting and characters who use phrases I haven't heard in years, perfectly suited to the eras in which the story is set. It has a real sense of nostalgia and took me back years, I loved it, reading this book was like coming home, warm and comforting. Perfect.