This week I am revisiting a book that appealed to me a few years ago not least as with current events it has been taking me out of where I need to be, that boarding school girl and just be surrounded by groan up stuff that doesn't do me much good
This book was published in the autumn of 2014 and concerns the life of one Opal Plumstead aged 14 who got a scholarship to attend school planning to go on to university when she was older.
Alas her plans are shattered upon her father being sent to prison and so unable to take up the scholarship and having to get a a job at the Fairy Glen sweet factory to keep her family as was often the case in 1913.
To start with she struggles with getting on the staff who think she's "stuck up" and snobby unlike them but she takes a shine to Mrs Roberts, the business owner introducing her to the Suffragette movement.
She also meets Morgan, the son and heir to the business who she feels she finally has a soul mate in but with war on the horizon bringing many forced changes it can only change Opal's life forever.
As a piece of historical fiction it helps to bring to life the lives and events of that whole era that lead to WW1 and in its aftermath the widespread social changes of Great Britain that I enjoyed learning about when I was younger.
To me setting things in their everyday context makes it easier to comprehend just how peoples could change so suddenly in an era without social insurance and where to see the doctor cost money.
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