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Goodnight from London

Goodnight From London tells the story of Ruby Sutton, a journalist who is sent to London at the dawn of World War II to cover the war from the perspective of a young American woman. Once there, she endures the deprivations of war on the home front, the Blitz, sees the changes and horrors that the war causes in Britain, meets a man, falls in love, and all that good stuff.

Honestly, while this was a good read while I was reading it, in the end I found it curiously unsatisfying, and I spent about four days thinking about why. First is that Ruby Sutton is a boring heroine. She has one big secret in her background, and a bunch of adversity she needed to fight through to get to her place in the world as a journalist. But once she got that job, everyone falls over themselves to help her, except for one and a half people. There is very little that even mildly complicates her life.

Hell, she gets bombed out of her flat during the Blitz, and ends up safe and sound with rich friends, so other than, “well, my passport got blown up, that kinda sucks,” it barely causes a hiccup. Even when her Big Secret comes out, the complications get quietly washed away. And these are MAJOR complications! They should have had actual repercussions, and not have been neatly disposed of in half a chapter.

The romance is mostly conflictless: he’s got a weird job during the war so he’s in and out of London, but there’s barely any tension. The whole book is “Ruby wants to do something, people help her in doing that thing, Ruby worries that she’s not worthy of their help, people fall over themselves to assure her that she’s adored, rinse, repeat.”

The best parts of this book where the stories that Ruby went out to report on, like a field hospital in France, or the aftermath of the bombing of Coventry. Those parts were great. But all the interpersonal non-drama was a HUGE drag.

– Redheadedgirl

From USA Today bestselling author Jennifer Robson—author of Moonlight Over Paris and Somewhere in France—comes a lush historical novel that tells the fascinating story of Ruby Sutton, an ambitious American journalist who moves to London in 1940 to report on the Second World War, and to start a new life an ocean away from her past.

In the summer of 1940, ambitious young American journalist Ruby Sutton gets her big break: the chance to report on the European war as a staff writer for Picture Weekly newsmagazine in London. She jumps at the chance, for it’s an opportunity not only to prove herself, but also to start fresh in a city and country that know nothing of her humble origins. But life in besieged Britain tests Ruby in ways she never imagined.

Although most of Ruby’s new colleagues welcome her, a few resent her presence, not only as an American but also as a woman. She is just beginning to find her feet, to feel at home in a country that is so familiar yet so foreign, when the bombs begin to fall.

As the nightly horror of the Blitz stretches unbroken into weeks and months, Ruby must set aside her determination to remain an objective observer. When she loses everything but her life, and must depend upon the kindness of strangers, she learns for the first time the depth and measure of true friendship—and what it is to love a man who is burdened by secrets that aren’t his to share.

Goodnight from London, inspired in part by the wartime experiences of the author’s own grandmother, is a captivating, heartfelt, and historically immersive story that readers are sure to embrace.