This book dealt with love, loss and sacrifice spanning most of the twentieth century. The book begins with a bus full of refugees from the bombing in Southampton being brought to the small village of Upton approximately 20 miles away, where Ellen, the wife of the miller, finds a little girl asleep on the back seat of the bus with no one claiming her or admitting that they knew anything about her. Ellen falls for the little girl, Pamela and decides that she will foster her. Eventually, following discoveries about the child's mother, her father turns up three years later determined to take her and send her to live in Ireland with his sister and Pamela's cousins. From the loss of Pamela, which Ellen feels keenly, the story looks at Ellen's own childhood and the losses she suffered then, together with events which follow many years later when Ellen makes a connection with another young girl, Penny.

The complex situations and the depth of characters made this a very enjoyable read, and I ended the book with a few tears, I have to admit!

I was given a copy of this book via Netgalley on behalf of Harper Collins 4th Estate in exchange for an honest review.

Ellen has a harsh poverty-stricken upbringing, living cold and hungry with her mother, brought down by the actions of her father. With the death of her mother, Ellen is all alone. She meets Selwyn Parr, a local miller, damaged from the Great War, and they fall into a life full of love.

With the bombing of Southampton in WW2, Pamela, a lost child, enters their lives and becomes the daughter they could never have. Seemingly destined for sadness, Pamela's departure shapes the rest of Ellen's life.

Beautifully crafted, heartbreaking, sad, yet so full of love, We Must Be Brave is a book to remember, full of characters to care about, and vivid descriptions of the rural community of Upton, Highly recommended.

A charming story beautifully told. It is a story set in World War 2 but does cover a big time span. Well rounded characters who have a heart warming tale to tell. Not the usual run of the mill war story, taking an interesting angle of what it means to love a child. Well worth a read

I just loved this book. I don’t normally read this type of book but it was so beautifully written and such a sweeping story. It was so lovely to read about someone being kind and selfless in this cynical world. The characters pulled the reader in from the beginning and were very real and the feeling of sadness but just getting on with was a theme throughout without being maudlin.. What struck me at the beginning was the thought that for all its faults thank goodness for the benefit system in this country!

I was on the verge of tears for about the last third of the book - the characters got me deep, and I was utterly engrossed in the story.

Thanks to netgalley for an early copy in return for an honest review
Some great characters in this book but found my self drowning at times a lot of waffling not quite how I imagined this book to be but saying all that an ok read.

Ellen lives outside Southampton in a rural village. She is housing 3 refugee boys from London when a busload of people fleeing a raid in Southampton, arrive. At the back of the bus a lone 5 year old is found sleeping under a blanket. Urged aboard by some women who thought her mother already boarded, she is now lost. Ellen takes her home, hopefully to reunite her with her mother when the raid is over.

This wasn't my usual 'wartime' reading - it was primarily about a mother's love for a child, relationships, love and loss. The war seemed to be going on in the background, setting some scenes and usually spoken of in terms of evacuation and food shortages and some personal injuries to some of the characters. (Maybe that was the experience of some ordinary people, who may not have been more interested in the politics).

I started reading with the impression that this was a sort of light family saga featuring WRVS teas and 'make do and mend' ladies, which didn't really engage me; but after the first quarter, I'm glad I persevered. My interest was raised from the description of Ellen's childhood and upbringing. It moved to a personal, emotional account of abject poverty, despair and loneliness. I still found the local community a bit 'twee', and the war, distant.

The loss to local villages from the effects of both world wars is both sobering and humanised, saving the book from purely personal, emotional stuff. The absolute yearning of a woman for ‘her’ child is felt as a primeval force through the book. There are surprises and twists (not entirely unguessed) along the way, but it does feel a bit strange the way the time scale zooms off in the post war period. Entertaining enough, but it did not envelop me.

Loved, loved loved the first half of this book. The best summary is “Light between oceans” seton the UK in WW2. Young girl is found asleep on the back of a bus with evacuees from the city, but without a parent. Ellen and her husband look after her until the mother or family can be traced, but Pamela’s mum has been killed in the bombings and there is no other family to care for her.

Ellen and her husband have no children of their own and both have their own tales to tell.... but they take Pamela completely in to their hearts,,, until one day there is word that she may have family after all.

Didn’t feel the second half lived up to the first and felt it lost its way a bit, but a good solid ending.

This is not your usual WW2 story it is about loss and grief and secrets and how chance encounters can change everything.

I found it a bit of struggle in the mid section of the book. There is lots of this book that really could have been edited down, page after page of descriptions of encounters between the characters, some of which are central to the story and some of which just seem to be passing the time. I did find myself skipping some of these piece to get to the bits where I felt the story was being told. However the characters in this book are so well fleshed out that you really do feel like you know them, can picture them and relate to them.

Despite struggling with the writing style and lack of chapter breaks and jumping through parts of the book it definitely captured me and I will admit that I sobbed through the last little of the book which I feel was meant to be a happy ending but for me I just felt like what a terrible waste of their lives that they totally could have shared but which neither woman was ultimately brave enough to find the other. I spent the whole 2nd half of the book hoping and waiting for Pamela to come back, by the time she did it was not quite too late but almost which absolutely broke my heart and as the book went on I become more and more frustrated at Ellen's lack of action to find Pamela.

So in summary, this is a great story, really it is, but the writing style makes for tough reading and it definitely drags in places. I feel like it could do with a good edit so that it flows a bit better and you are wading through pages and pages trying to find the bits where something actually happens.

An interesting viewpoint of the effects of war on one woman, it was an emotional read although I found it quite long and could have enjoyed a bit more to the story.

Thank for the review copy

We Must Be Brave was a book that I received from NetGalley and I had been on a real historical fiction push so this seemed to be the perfect fit for my reading but for some reason it just didn’t grab my attention. I actually really struggled with reading through this and I even took a break halfway through reading it which I never do. I think I said in one of the previous posts that I don’t like reading too many books at the same time. I don’t know what it was about this book, but I just wasn’t reaching for it.

I think one of the problems with We Must Be Brave and I know that this won’t be an issue with the final book but for me it was a huge distraction was the bad formatting in the e-book. I think it really impacted my reading experience and I know that I should look past it to the actual story but I found it really difficult, especially discerning what were people’s names and places.

We Must Be Brave had a unique perspective that I really loved, the people involved weren’t necessarily in the direct line of the war, but they were impacted just the same. I loved the insight into the way that everything worked and what the fears ended up being outside of the obvious air raids, including invasion and rationing. I thought the fact that there was no obvious threat that it made the telling of the story all the better.

I did think that the ending was a little bit rushed I loved the concept but I would have loved for there to have been a little more development and I thought the main events in her life were kind off brushed over. I would have liked to see a little more emotion, especially as we had seen so much previously. It almost felt like the entire of the second half of We Must Be Brave was an afterthought and filler until we got to the end.

I loved the relationship that was built between Pamela and Ellen, for once I thought it was a completely realistic, especially with the tantrums and the fact that it wasn’t all perfect from the beginning. Plus it was great to see a child actually deal with grief instead of just being overwhelmingly grateful for being taken in. I thought that We Must Be Brave dealt with this instance perfectly.

I think even with my issues with We Must Be Brave I would still recommend it. I loved the way the book ended and I also thought the insight into living through the war was extremely well done. Something I was really interested in.

Just finished this wonderful book. My eyes are still red from all my tears, and I just know it is going to stay with me for a long time. I am not being very brave at all about it.
Frances Liardet can write. We Must Be Brave is beautiful, studied and full of emotion. It spans fitty years or so, but concentrates on the key times for the story in the 1940s and 1970s. All of the characters are flawed yet written with sensitivity and warmth. I loved them all. It is a long book, but I didn't want to put it down and I wish I hadn't read it yet so that I can start it all over again.
I highly recommend this thoughtful and moving book.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to read and review #WeMustbeBrave #NetGalley

Ellen is a young married woman living in a village near Southampton during the WWII. There's been a bombing raid on Southampton and buses have carried people to the village from Southampton for safety. Ellen finds a young girl, Pamela, on the bus without anyone with her. She takes care of her initially until they can reunite her with her mother, but the arrangement becomes more long term when they discover her mother died in the raid and her father hasn't been around for years. The love Ellen has for Pamela and their close bond is described beautifully and is the best thing about this book. The story starts strongly and I loved reading Ellen's backstory as well but the plot seems to fizzle out halfway through and doesn't amount to much afterwards. In later life Ellen helps another young girl at the local school and I hoped that this plot-line would rejuvenate the story but it didn't seem to. I did enjoy the book overall.

Genuinely poignant and a fresh take on the evacuee story. It appears very well researched too and rings true

Tough subject matter. It is not an easy read and at times it is quite challenging. However, saying that it is worth persevering with it. This book is based on war however it looks at aspects of war that is not often talked or written about how it affects families, people, relationships the things that are often forgotten.
It is a thinking book- meaning it certainly gets you thinking during and after you have read it.
With all that Frances Liardet has still achieved a beautifully written novel.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Harper Collins UK for giving me the opportunity to read ’We Must be Brave’ in exchange for my unbiased opinion

This book was not an easy read. I expected something like a "typical" war story, about a child. In a way I have got what I expected, but this book is nothing of a typical war story. It is a story of people and relationships, a story of love and suffering, a story so full of feelings that it leaves you impressed long after you finished it.
The style of the book is quite full absorbing and not really easy to read. I was sometimes missing some information, what caused some confusion, even though the information was there later in the book. I loved Ellen as a character and consider her being verywell and relistically depicted. Her suffering and her life was so near to me throughout the boook that I consider her being a longtime friend, I would not like to miss any more.
It impressed me very much and I would recommend it highly!

When did you last have a really proper cry reading a novel? As far as I’m concerned it happens rarely. However, ‘We Must Be Brave’ had me sobbing several times over during the course of the narrative. The story begins in December 1940 when young housewife, Ellen, fosters five year old Pamela, an abandoned evacuee. It transpires that Pamela’s mother has been killed in a bomb blast. After a disastrous attempt at placing evacuee Pamela elsewhere, Ellen and her husband Selwyn foster the child who proves to be intelligent and quirky and who eventually settles to look upon Ellen as a quasi-mother. There is nothing sentimental in the depiction of this relationship. Author Frances Liardet understands that anyone who has been through Pamela’s experience will not be an easy child, yet Ellen is devoted to her, not least because she knows what it feels like to be displaced and disgraced.
Over the course of the novel we learn about Ellen’s childhood and appreciate why Pamela is so important to her. Liardet paints a very moving picture of extreme poverty without sensationalising it in any way. One can feel the hunger pangs and the bone-chilling cold of a 1930s winter during which Ellen has to resort to sleeping under a ‘mouse-saturated carpet’ laid on top of her bedding for extra warmth. The only hope of survival is given through the occasional acts of kindness from struggling neighbours.
Eventually ‘orphan’ Pamela is claimed and the parting between Ellen and her foster daughter is incredibly moving. The author represents Pamela’s partial understanding of her move to Ireland to live with her kind and caring extended family extremely well. At first she is curious and keen, yet we soon understand that this is mainly because she thinks that Ellen will be coming with her. As the whole truth gradually sinks in we see Pamela’s fear, hurt and anger in full. It is a wholly convincing depiction of a child in utter turmoil.
Post WWII, we learn of the bereft Ellen’s feelings through a series of letters to Pamela that she writes but never posts. We also learn ‘what happens next’ as Ellen lives through the second half of the twentieth century. It’s understandable that Liardet also feels compelled to show the reader what happens to all of the secondary characters as we follow Ellen through the decades: Ellen’s husband, Selwyn, her friend Lucy, and the eccentric Lady Brock and her gardener William Kennet, especially as not all of their relationships with Ellen are as transparent as assumed at first. English village life is also very effectively depicted in an unromantic manner, acknowledging both hardships and improvements over the course of the twentieth century as well as recognising that important traditional aspects have been lost. However, nothing matches the emotional punch of Ellen and Pamela’s war-years bond, and it is for this stand-out depiction that the novel should be read first and foremost, and why I am awarding it ‘5 stars’. ‘We Must Be Brave’ shows us a great deal about love and loss, joy and pain and reminds us that these experiences are frequently linked. Perhaps we must be brave because there is no other better reaction when the unbearable happens.
My thanks to NetGalley and 4th Estate (Harper Collins) for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

A beautifully written book. This would make a great read for a woman's reading group. Although fiction, I presume, this could easily be an account of true life taking place in England during WW2. It gives a view of how life in an English village has evolved and how one off encounters can change and influence a whole life time and generation.

What a brilliant book! I loved the dilemmas that the story evoked, and I could totally see how Ellen felt when she rescued Pamela from the back of the bus. The characters are beautifully written, real people that you could meet in your local town or village. The descriptions of the chaos of the war and the bombing really brought home to me how it must have felt to experience that and how easily things could go wrong. Tangled relationships beautifully illustrated weave a fantastic and memorable story. Well worth reading!

What a moving book! I loved the characters of Ellen and Pamela and thought over all this story had a very profound message