The Girl You Left Behind

 

Last Jojo Moyes review – I promise!

You’re busy, right?  Even if you are conspicuously not busy: lying on the sofa watching Netflix, eating a big sandwich foraged from your fully stocked fridge, with a crossed-off to-do list by your side, you’re probably feeling busy.  Perhaps that’s my London bubble, perhaps that’s just modern life.  But it feels like we all feel busy, all the time.  And you and I are DEFINITELY too busy to be reading or writing reviews for a book that was just a way of whiling away some hours.  So for your productivity, and my own interest, I am instating a new shorter One Hundred Word Review for those titles that don’t need me agonising over their themes and foibles.  Here we go:

If you have a heartland, best stick to it.  Moyes leaves her usual stomping ground for wartime occupied France, spinning the story behind a painting.  This departure reaches for well-worn tropes – this is the Vichy France of plucky resistance and Impressionist painters.  Much better is the present day section: court-case, love story, coincidences and misunderstandings make for an unsurprising but perfectly enjoyable outing, and here Moyes’s characterisation is back to full strength.  Wartime France is too common a subject for lazy writing, though, and if you’re interested in it, All The Light We Cannot See is in a different league.

Mic drop. Room of Joy out.

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