Book Review: Yours Cheerfully

18.11.2021

Book Review | Yours Cheerfully by AJ Pearce

AJ Pearce’s Dear Mrs Bird was one of my favourite reads of 2019. The tone is wonderfully WW2-era British jolly hockey sticks, it takes a fun look behind the scenes of an agony aunt page at a fictional women’s magazine before shifting delicately into a darker, sadder reality of war. The protagonist is Emmy Lake, a chirpy wannabe war journalist, who lives in London with her best friend Bunty and is desperate to help with the war effort. I read it in a flash while on honeymoon and have been waiting impatiently for the sequel ever since.

So I’m sorry to say that the first half of the book was a bit of a slog for me. The delightful Emmy was back but this time the tone grated on me a bit and, thumbing through page after page about changes at the magazine, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe Dear Mrs Bird should have been left as a standalone novel. The pace picks up a bit when the Ministry of Information gets in touch and requests that the magazine (along with all other UK women’s magazines) assist in the recruiting of women to munitions factories. Emmy leaps at the chance to show her patriotism and persuade others to join in with war work, roping in a munitions worker called Anne who she meets on a train journey. She heads off to the factory where Anne works, interviews some of the other women working there and files her first piece of serious journalism. Though she’s delighted when her writing is a hit, she soon becomes disappointed with the things she’s asked to leave out.

The story becomes very interesting, with a focus specifically on the lack of provisions the factories make for single mothers or those with men away in the army. Despite this, I still wasn’t fully invested until the tension really ramped up with Emmy doing what she does best - going out on a limb and risking everything for a cause she believes in. The final section of the book was exactly what I’d been hoping for the whole time and suddenly I couldn’t put it down!

Yours Cheerfully took on a more serious wartime topic than Dear Mrs Bird, and I think it was because of that that I struggled with it. The storyline was engaging but didn’t consistently work with the lighter tone that I loved so much in the first book. Despite my gripes I would recommend Yours Cheerfully. It follows on with Bunty’s story in a lovely way, catches us up on Emmy’s relationship and explores an important bit of our history.

Thanks to Netgalley for a complimentary digital ARC in return for an honest review.

Buy Yours Cheerfully HERE.