Hopeful Hearts at the Wartime Hotel is #2 in a WWII home front series, featuring three entrepreneurial women.

Hopeful Hearts at the Wartime Hotel by Maisie Thomas

Genre/Categories/Setting: Historical Fiction (WWII home front), Women’s Fiction, Friendship, Women Supporting Women, Manchester

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My Summary:

Thanks #NetGalley @BoldwoodBooks for a complimentary eARC of #HopefulHeartsAtTheWartimeHotel upon my request. All opinions are my own.

Hopeful Hearts at the Wartime Hotel continues to follow the lives of three women who are keeping the Dunbar Hotel afloat during WWII. Kitty Dunbar was forced to take matters into her own hands as a result of her husband’s bad business decisions. She transformed the hotel into a storage facility to help bombed-out families save their salvaged belongings. Lily, a former hotel employee, and Beatrice, a kind-hearted social worker, team up with LIly to save the hotel. Their latest innovative idea involves hosting wedding receptions.

My Thoughts:

Resilient, Independent, and Innovative

I love stories of women supporting women, and a WWII home front setting provides many challenges for our three main characters. In book one, we see the three women forge a friendship and combine their efforts to save the Dunbar Hotel by turning it into a storage facility. In this installment, the hotel is at capacity (storage-wise), so the women need to increase their income in additional ways. This leads to their idea of hosting wedding receptions. At this point, the women work well together, and they also support each other personally. Kitty’s daughter is now coming of age and lends her support as well. Strong women are up to the task in challenging times.

Hope

A strong theme of hope runs through both books. Even when making difficult decisions and facing challenging times, friendship and hope for a better future sustain the three women.

Series

As with any series, I recommend reading the books in order. This is the second installment, so it’s not a daunting task to read both. Although the author spends time in the beginning of this story refreshing our memory of book one, it’s not the same as having read it for yourself. I look forward to following the lives of these three women in future installments.

My review of Book One: A New Home at the Wartime Hotel

Recommending Hopeful Hearts at the Wartime Hotel:

Fans of home front WWII histfic will find a lot to appreciate in this heartfelt and uplifting series.

My Rating: 4 Stars

More Information Here

Meet the Author of Hopeful Hearts at the Wartime Hotel, Maisie Thomas

Maisie Thomas is the author of the Wartime Hotel series published by Boldwood. The stories concentrate on the importance of female friendship, especially when those friendships come about unexpectedly, and the ways in which women support one another through the highs and lows of everyday life in wartime. The books follow on from one another, but at the same time, each is complete in itself.

Maisie is also the author of the bestselling Railway Girls saga series about the brave women and girls who worked on Britain’s railways in WW2. She also writes as Susanna Bavin and Polly Heron. As Polly, she writes the 1920s saga series, The Surplus Girls, about young women striving for independence in the aftermath of the First World War. As Susanna she has written four stand-alone sagas (The Deserter’s Daughter, A Respectable Woman, The Sewing Room Girl and The Poor Relation) and a WW2 saga series, The Home Front Girls, about the lives of young women working in a salvage depot.

Maisie was born and brought up in Manchester, which provides the location for her novels. She now lives on the beautiful North Wales coast with her husband and their two rescue cats.

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QOTD:

Do you enjoy WWII home front fiction?

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