Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

It’s been several years since I read Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s The War That Saved My Life; it was a Newbery Honor book in 2016, and I was apparently keeping up with Newberys better then than I am now.  (Life happens.)  I flipped through it last year, however, when my oldest needed a novel about WWII, and I was wowed by it all over again.  I must have been in a critical state of mind when I reviewed it, because its writing style struck me as perfect for it this time around, and I was quite excited to read its sequel, The War I Finally Won.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Pardon me for the overused, modern adverb, but The War I Finally Won grows from its predecessor in an incredibly organic way.  (There’s just no way NOT to sound pretentious there.  Sorry!)  Ada’s continuing story makes perfect sense, as do her changing struggles and the varied hardships that life in wartime Britain brings.  Deaths, war work, illness, and new concepts and ideas assail her from all sides, but as a hard-won sense of self begins to emerge for her, Ada triumphs in ways that brought tears to my eyes.  If you haven’t read the beginning of Ada’s story, do it now–and then read her sequel as well.  Both books are incredibly worth it.