Marie-Claire Leblanc's Reviews > The Girls in Blue

This book. Where to start…

The story itself sounded intriguing (with just the right amount of drama!). The execution unfortunately was a bit of a letdown. Firstly, there was something a little off about the writing style to me. Maybe it was a lack of detail or focussing on the wrong things in a scene but everything just felt sort of glossed over. It created an odd distance between the reader and the characters and I never really felt like I got to know them. There were also a few things that I felt were overdone in the story:

1. The use of the term that man. It was okay the first time but dear god, it got annoying by the twenty first time. It was like the author ctrl+f’d “her father” and replaced it with that man (always in italics of course). I think the author was trying to convey that Jane couldn’t even think of him as her father and used the term as a way to distance herself. But it was so incredibly overused that I wanted to stop reading by the end of the first chapter. It was that bad.

2. The obsession with going to the toilet. In every scene I feel like we knew where the bathroom was and who had to pee (oddly it was never number 2…). Every time Jane woke up she was “desperate” to go pee. We get it. Humans have bodily functions. They need to go to the bathroom. Peeing is a normal thing that literally everyone does in some fashion or another. But when there is a reference to it every other chapter and it does nothing to move the plot forward, it’s just weird.

3. The amount of times Jane was injured was ludicrous. The degree to which she was injured was ludicrous. It’s spoiler time. (view spoiler)[ the first injury (aside from the pre-existing bruises from that man) was a head injury for which she required stitches. She was diagnosed as “concussed” and it kept her out of training for about a week. This seems realistic. Then she stands up too fast when trying to run away (I think?) from Oscar and slices her head open again. Bleeds a lot. More stitches. Stitches that miraculously don’t hurt the next day as she styles her hair around them proving that the author has never had stitches before. They tend to hurt the next day. Then gets ANOTHER head injury later in the book which results in, you got it, more bleeding, presumably more stitches (how does she not look like Frankenstein’s monster at this point??) and, holy sh*t, memory loss? Where she forgets who she is? It’s explained that it’s due to cumulative brain injuries. Which, okay, fine. That could be true. But I don’t think they actually knew that in the ‘40s. I don’t think science had wised up to the idea that TBIs could have cumulative effects until the latter part of the twentieth century. Maybe the ‘80s or even ‘90s. Also, holy melodrama Batman! That’s too much. (hide spoiler)]

Okay, now let’s talk about the bait and switch. If you’ve read the book you know what I mean. I’m talking about (view spoiler)[ when Jane was told that someone died and she decided not to stick around to be told who it actually was. She immediately thinks it’s Oscar (it’s not) and goes through like all 5 stages of grief in a single page only to be told it was (ultra predictably) that man who has kicked it. AND THEN almost immediately she is told that Oscar is in fact MIA as his plane had been shot down off the coast of Dunkirk and could very well be dead (he’s not). It’s confirmed that he’s dead 4 days later (he’s not) and she goes to his family home to break the news. We know Oscar is not dead because we’re stilling getting his story from his POV so we know exactly what has happened to him. It was all just so melodramatic and honestly just too much. Their relationship was already dramatic as it was. The constant breaking it off and coming together again. The injuries. The kidnapping. The trauma she lived with because of her upbringing. It was exhausting. (hide spoiler)]

The book was not terrible. I mean, I finished it and I normally don’t even finish a book if it’s too bad. But it just wasn’t great. I don’t think I’ll be reading the next ones in the series.