Historical Fiction Review: Kate Thompson’s THE LITTLE WARTIME LIBRARY

Written by Miss Bates

Little_Wartime_LibraryWhen SuperWendy recs a book, I listen; she’s yet to steer me wrong and she certainly didn’t with Thompson’s Little Wartime Library. (I link to her review.) Thompson’s historical novel is a book lover’s dream, among many many other themes and stories. Based on a “true story,” it tells of two friends, chief librarian Clara Button and her assistant, Ruby Monroe. Their library is as unusual as it is necessary to their Bethnal Green neighbourhood: situated in an abandoned tube tunnel where hundreds of people made homeless by bombing, or frightened of being bombed, live underground. There’s a theatre, bunks, a school of sorts, a medical centre, even a ballet, and at the heart of what is, most importantly, a community, a library where people meet, chat, court, grieve, and read to escape, laugh, cry, and share books amidst war, death, destruction, fear, and trauma, all of which are rendered in chapter after chapter even as children grow, babies are born, books are read, enjoyed, and discussed, loves are met and made. Everyone carries pain and everyone carries hope. For those who enjoy the publisher’s rendering, here it is:

An uplifting and inspiring novel based on the true story of a librarian who created an underground shelter during World War II… 

London, 1944: Clara Button is no ordinary librarian. While war ravages the city above her, Clara has risked everything she holds dear to turn the Bethnal Green tube station into the country’s only underground library. Down here, a secret community thrives with thousands of bunk beds, a nursery, a café, and a theater—offering shelter, solace, and escape from the bombs that fall upon their city.

Along with her glamorous best friend and assistant Ruby Munroe, Clara ensures the library is the beating heart of life underground. But as the war drags on, the women’s determination to remain strong in the face of adversity is tested to the limits when it may come at the price of keeping those closest to them alive. 

Thompson creates a world that is dangerous, frightening, and traumatic above ground within a setting, the library and its other underground community elements, that is safe, often happy, comforting, no matter its smell, deprivation, and constraint. The above world bleeds into the below and the characters’ traumas colour their lives in both. Setting, mood, and atmosphere are Thompson’s strengths. The reader both wants to be in this cocooned world and, of course, given it’s Blitz-ed London, doesn’t.

Into this world, it seems, from the blurb, we have two singular characters, Clara and Ruby, and their stories. But that isn’t so; Thompson’s novel is an ensemble piece, with Clara and Ruby at its heart, but so many stories are told. Possibly too many: this makes for a novel where threads are created, dropped, and then picked up. For example, Clara, a war widow, and Ruby, a seemingly happy-go-lucky girl “hot to trot” as we used to say in my high school, find love: Clara in the form of Billy, a conscientious objector and heroic, decorated ambulance driver, and Ruby, in an American GI named Eddie. Both love stories are introduced, developped, and then dropped and give way to others: Ruby’s mother’s abusive marriage, two Jewish war children arrived from Jersey, the Tube Rats, a variety of working-class kids who come to the library for story time, including adorable Sparrow, who learns to read with Clara’s help; the story of Mr. Pepper, losing his eyesight and wife in a bombing, the inimitable Mrs. Chumley, the shelter’s manager, a figure all at once Athena, Hera, and Artemis, heaped onto these and many other narrative threads is a Jack the Ripper figure who preys on the neighbourhood’s women when they’re above ground, as well as the personal traumas of our two protagonists, Clara’s guilt over losing her husband, Duncan; Ruby’s over losing her sister and failure to protect her mother.

And so much more: this didn’t make Thompson’s pacing any good, giving her novel a stop-start feel, even though her belief and upholding of the HEA made narrative threads come together by the end…though I was restless in places, even a little bored, or impatient, I appreciated the fulfilling, satisfying endings, without making them pat, or taking away from the traumas that cannot heal.

Thompson’s novel, however, possesses one motif that remains in every story, character, and occurrence, the love and importance of books and reading. How I loved this! The novel opens with the phrase “We are a nation of readers” and my Kindle note to that: “who can say that now?” Sadly, no one. The “Reading for Victory “campaign will never be again. (In every “nation,” there are devoted readers, but reading as the primary form of respite and entertainment is now sidelined with crafts and cats.) Into this love of books and reading is another important thread, that is, how books, romance in particular, from Austen to Heyer to Winsor’s Forever Amber (how I too found romance, Ms Thompson!, though not quite a romance, close enough) gives women respite, yes, but also, at times, the impetus to change their lives for the better by throwing off men and circumstances constraining them. The war saw women in work that was unwomanlike before, but surely, Thompson posits, the work of the romance’s imagination played its part? Or as Ruby says, “She’d take hussy over housewife any day.” Hear, hear, Ruby, hear, hear.

In the end, is Thompson’s historical novel perfect? By no means: there’s simply too much: too many stories to tell, the angst is piled on with slatherings of melodrama, and the prose is, at times, a tad stilted and overly sentimental. But this reader, well, she did shed a few tears at she turned the last page in the wee hours…and looks forward to her next Thompson.

22 thoughts on “Historical Fiction Review: Kate Thompson’s THE LITTLE WARTIME LIBRARY”

  1. I started this book and metaphorically threw it across the room because of such an obvious and avoidable blooper in the prologue. It’s set in 2020 and she’s supposed to be 88 years old. So supposedly she was born in 1932, which would have made her 12 years old in 1944, when the events of the book were taking place. I couldn’t believe no editor caught this. The author could have very easily set the prologue in 2010, or even made her 98 instead of 88 in the flash-forward, and it would have made sense. This may not have been a logical reason to DNF the book, but I couldn’t get past it or trust the author after that.

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    1. You are great! I never noticed, mainly I think because I am math averse. I caught quite a few errors too, but it’s the way these days. Books are so badly edited, not even edited, but plain old proofread for basic stuff and it’s not done. Sad. I think it’s a book with too much going on in it and, like Bennet’s book which I reviewed previous to this one, I wish the editor had made this a tighter book, it would have been a lot better. And caught your error!! Wow, that’s bad.

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      1. I can’t help but doing math in my head, it just jumped out at me! I read books with language usage errors all the time, especially on Kindle, but for some reason but this bothered me more. You’re right about the lack of editing nowadays. There is a Twitter account I follow, dedicated just to grammar and punctuation errors in The New York Times. The only publication I know of with impeccable proof reading and editing is The New Yorker magazine.

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        1. Oh, yes, The New Yorker does hold up a standard, everything has gone to hell in a handbasket. As an English teacher, I feel I’ll be obsolete by the time I retire (four years!). I’m glad I’m at the twilight of my career…

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      2. My print copy is in storage, and this is a huge spoiler – but isn’t the identity of the 88-year-old in 2020 one of the child characters in 1944? 

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        1. Your memory and plot knowledge is WAY better than yours truly. Unless I reread, I can’t keep track of much, especially because I read right before falling asleep!

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        2. Wendy–you are right! I can’t remember the girl’s name, but she was connected to the letters hidden in the wall, Main point being that she is not one of our librarians.

          I did have the same bit of math confusion that Karin did, but it didn’t keep me from continuing. And I’m glad I did.

          I am sure that both you and Miss Bates noticed that Jennifer Ryan’s newest book (The Underground Library) is her version of the Bethnal Green Library. I’ve not read it, as Thompson’s book gave me ‘the story’ first.

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          1. Well, you’re both way more careful readers than yours truly, LOL!

            I have not, but librarians, even retired ones, KNOW ALL. Really, you guys are omniscient, like our school librarian. I didn’t know about Ryan’s Underground Library.

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          2. I had the math confusion then mentally shrugged, “Well it’s obviously not one of the librarians so I wonder who this person is?” 😂 

            I had seen the Ryan book but hadn’t bothered to check out the blurb – so didn’t know it was also about Bethnal Green Library! I’ll make up my mind once I do more research and maybe read the sample. The problem for me is that I loved Thompson’s book so much that even if the Ryan book is very good I might be unintentionally unfair, nitpicking everything half to death.

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            1. It was a very long book: at least you remembered the Prologue. Out of sight, out of mind. This is the problem, for me, of reading “e”. Nothing replaces a paper book for study and review. Mea culpa!

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    2. I always find it so interesting what will make a reader dislike (or DNF) a story that another reader will enjoy; I am not sure that this would have been a dealbreaker for me in this book, but on the other hand, I just DNFed a book because of how a character tried on a Victorian gown.

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        1. Oh, it’s much the same for me–though there is of course the rare book where I’ve been grateful to keep reading despite not being really hooked from the start, these days my reading mojo is too fragile to force myself to keep at it. Once I start avoiding picking up ye olde kindle, that’s generally it.

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  3. I’m an unapologetic angst junkie, so yeah.

    What really spoke to me with this book was the world building and the overall “saga” feel to the story. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve reached the Old Sea Hag phase of my professional career – no longer one with dewy ideals or romantic notions of vocational awe. The last several years of my job have been challenging for more reasons than just a global pandemic and let’s just say my outlook hasn’t been all that rosy or positive. This book reminded me in a very fundamental way that what I do for a living has value. It also reminded me to push back on colleagues the next time I have to listen to “libraries are more than just books!” drivel to justify our existence. Even if we were “just books” our existence would still be pretty frickin’ awesome.

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    1. I agree with you about libraries and Thompson’s saga. The best part of her book was the chance I had to crow over all the book references. I think libraries are formative because of books, not because they have Internet access. One is practical, yes, but the other is identity-building. And if that makes me sound like a “Old Sea Hag”, well I happily embrace the title!

      I’m going to openly plug my podcast here; with my English dept. colleagues, we discuss the books that “made us” and the discussion also figures around the role libraries played in that:

      Librarians and libraries are AWESOME! English teachers love you…

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