I wanted to love this book more than I did because the writing and the dialog were dazzlingly good and had my full attention. Unlike some other readers I found the characters compelling. I was fascinated to learn of the existence of a class of evacuees who were rejected by villages and either starved or returned to London because no home would take them in. I also liked the enormous IM-perfection of Mary, who was interested in teaching these students for less than pure reasons, and did her students a lot of good while also being by modern standards somewhat cruel and dismissive.

The subplot about race did not work for me. It struck me as a risky decision for a white novelist to represent racism against Black Americans in such a direct way, and for me the risk did not pay off--I found it distractingly shocking rather than effective to see certain words spelled out on the page and have them met with only mild reproof by our viewpoint character, and it was a weird decision to have the only major Black characters in the book be Americans who were there to perform in a minstrel show. (A casual google reveals there had been Caribbean Blacks in the British military since WWI.) Was this a realistic depiction of things that happened? Maybe, but it comes off all wrong in a novel.

I also found the depiction of the war's damages unrelenting. We know from contemporary diaries that most people who had terrible experiences on the home front also experienced good times and didn't see their lives as an uninterrupted slog right up to the end of the war. At a certain point I began to wonder whether the author was going to kill everyone off just to make the point that war is terrible.

But it was an alive and bristly kind of book, admirable in a lot of ways, different from most of the WWII novels I have read, so it has that going for it.