Fletching, East Sussex. Jane grows up in a small English village, with the talk of another war looming her Brother Bill wants to be a pilot and her Uncle Vic is a member of the territorial forces.

1939. The Second World War begins, Jane leaves school and gets her first job as servant in London. Jane wants to help the war effort and joins the Women’s Auxiliary Forces, and she became a nurse and she doesn’t stay in one place for long. The first half of the book is a little confusing, as she's constantly transferred and I really don’t know how Jane coped with so much upheaval.

Jane witnessed the Blitz, people being killed while going to a dance or the flicks, burned RAF pilots and V1 and V2 attacks in Kent and later in the war she made the week long plane trip to Ceylon and Singapore. Jane confront illness, death, grief, and the liberated Allied prisoners of war and the Japanese.

Not all of Jane’s story is sad she makes lifelong friends, visits tropical places that she had never dreamed of ever seeing, enjoyed the different food and fruit, hiked and swam.

I received a copy of The Posting by Gillian Edward from NetGalley and The Book Guild in exchange for an honest review. The biographical novel is written by Jane’s daughter in law and based on true facts, after she scribbled down her story and she thought it should be shared and rightly so. Jane or Alma Blanche Pyke Edwards lived an amazing life, she showed incredible strength, grit, fortitude and composure.

The last half of the book was by far the most interesting and moving, three and a half stars and I recommend.

1939 England was bleak and for an adventurous young woman, village life was a trifle limiting. Going upto London to work as a domestic was a first step in a tale which swept Jane from the confines of a very narrow world, right across the world to Morocco, Egypt which were transit points and then on to Karachi, India and eventually Ceylon now Sri Lanka and then finally to Singapore.

Working as a junior nurse was very hard and the privations and harshness of superiors was grim but Jane and her fellow nurses always seemed to find something to be happy about. The stories are very vivid, very descriptive of actual living conditions in far flung areas with very little equipment and supplies but tge nurses did a marvellous job with limited resources they had. They also had adventures galore, visiting every place of interest they could, despite orders not to!

I was particularly interested in Jane’s work in Ceylon, being Sri Lankan myself and the story was so informative as well on facilities I had no idea about and the yeoman tasks entrusted to these young women.

The story is a real one, an account of the authors own mother in law who was an intrepid and brave young lady who flew into an unknown and alien land very bravely.

The cover however does not do the story justice.

Whew. This one slowly got under your skin - in a good way!

It starts off feeling pretty straightforward, but the deeper I got into it, the more invested I became. There were so many moments where I thought I knew where it was going… and then it completely shifted.

I love books that make me question everyone, and this definitely did that. A solid, atmospheric read that kept me flipping pages.

Coming from Sussex myself, I found this fascinating - both in the allusions to places familiar to me and in the stark contrast to the life that followed. The opening sections read very much like memory fragments (in keeping with the source) but also felt coherent in the way that the war made life so hard to predict with each seeming new chapter of life abruptly redirected due to forces outwith anyone’s control. An informative, thought-provoking and accessible read.

First, thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this novel. I am a big fan of historical fiction so this was right up my alley. Honestly, the story overall is good especially considering it’s based on someone’s life. The first half seems a bit jumpy but you can tell they reached their stride at the halfway mark.

This is the fascinating, historically rich, true story of the author’s mother-in-law’s lived experiences as a nurse during WWII. Jane Pike is a curious, somewhat sheltered girl from Fletchings who, after a series of job flummoxes, decides to be a nurse and enlists. The first half of the book is dedicated to her adventures that result from a seemingly inability to make curfew, stay on base, remain in hotels or show up when her travel plans are arranged. As a result of a clandestine foray into London, she and some friends miss their boat to Ceylon and must be flown across India and North Africa over the span of four weeks. If the first half of the book is a somewhat laissez-faire approach to her enlistment, the second half is boots on the ground. From the moment they are taken to their first posting in the jungle near Ceylon, Jane’s duty as an active combat nurse is in full swing. Festering wounds, malaria, P.O.W. survivors, and impromptu co-piloting - she quickly graduates from the carefree curfew-breaking girl of the first half of the book to a heart torn war-tested nurse in the second. While I realize that the adventures she has during her journey to Ceylon were exciting, her experiences once she arrives are so unique that I don’t think I am alone in wishing more of the book had been dedicated to that time. I’m not sure if that was a function of authorial editing or simply the amount of material given by the subject. Clearly, based on her experiences at war, her joyful times traveling to the base may have been something she simply recounted with more detail.

Although I applaud the notion of documenting family narratives, this book was curated by a writer whose previous works were more self help/motivational writing, and thus this reads with a somewhat novice feel. It does not resemble historical fiction in style and treats moments of great significance with frustratingly informal prose. The first half reads more as a disjointed list of things the main character did, rather than a fluid sequence of events. Part of what is problematic about this is that jumping from one event to the next gives little emotional depth to Jane’s experience, lending the character a two-dimensional feel. In addition, the author repeatedly switches into the first person: “we walk to the market, we look at the stalls”, which takes what should be a vibrant moment and turns it into a grammar-school style. There are odd repetitive verbs throughout the book that are out of context; in the middle of calm conversations she will write that one of the characters “shouts” instead of “says” something. Then, after large passages of linear writing the text switches into sentence fragments. None of this is artistic but rather unpolished and distracting. It is very hard for me to be this critical of writing that is based on a lived experience, or biographical; in no way do I want this to be an indictment of the story itself (which is astronomical) but rather of the method of written presentation.

Again, I champion the author’s desire to document her mother-in-law’s very unique and highly relevant experience. I just question whether a story of this magnitude would’ve been better told with an additional, more experienced writer as part of the process. I would recommend this book to people who are specifically looking for first person narratives of India’s role in WWII, the history of Sri Lanka’s independence, or accounts of P.O.W.’s in Japan. However, as historical fiction in general I would say there are much more accessible texts.