Unfortunately this book was archived before I could read it.

This is a really lovely story, very evocative of time and place. The Evacuee Christmas is beautifully written and is a wonderful story of wartime London giving a great insight into how tough things were at that time. The author gives us a good knowledge and feel for all the characters. A brilliant Christmas read for someone who enjoys World War Two sagas. This would be a good gift idea.
My thanks to Mills and Boon and Net Galley for my advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book but took a little while to get used to the writing style. The characters were well-drawn and the small period details helped to make the scenes more vivid. I finished the book feeling that the plot was not resolved, but now I know it is the first of a trilogy I am interested in finding out what happens next.

Culture clashes, and adjusting to a new way of life as inner-city London children are evacuated to Harrogate during in 1939.
The characters are well created, and the descriptions of life on Jubilee Street in Bermondsey are atmospheric as the realities of life in war time set in. Similarly, the descriptions of Harrogate are engaging and well created, and you do get a feel for the setting, and can imagine the idea of being uprooted from everything you’ve ever known, and suddenly being placed in a completely different, rural environment. Connie and Jessie seem typical children of the era, and it is understandable that they would be worried and apprehensive about going to a strange place, although, they do have the bonus of their pregnant aunt going with them, so they are not totally removed from all they know.
As the book is set right at the start of the war, there are none of the usual London based wartime plots involving bombings and air raids, and instead the children are evacuated early on as a precaution due to the dockyards being a likely target.
The plot is engaging, although it did seem to take a while to really get going for my liking, as we find Connie, Jessie and their Aunt Peggy settling into life in Yorkshire, and, although there likely wound be difficulties with dialects, it did seem a bit over done on the fact that people were having conversations where they apparently had little or no idea of what the other person was talking about.
Obviously, Connie and Jessie are lucky in the fact they have Peggy around, and they are taken in by the kindly local vicar and his wife (although their son turns out the be the villain of the peace), however, the story does also refer to the fact that others weren’t so lucky, and didn’t have the best of times.
An easy going, enjoyable read, although, for me, it needed some more depth to the plot, or something to happen, and, personally, I wasn’t keen on the cover, as it presents it as a story about children, when in fact it is as much about Peggy and Barbara as it was about Connie and Jessie.