I have loved the opportunity to spend time researching novels to re-stockl our senior bookshelves in the school library that plays a central role in the life of the school. When I first took over the library was filled with dusty tomes that were never borrowed and languished there totally unloved.
Books like this, play a central role in ensuring that the library is stocked with fresh relevant fiction that appeals to the readers. It has a strong voice and a compelling plot that ensures that you speed through its pages, enjoying both its characterisation and dialogue whilst wanting to find out how all of its strands will be resolved by the end.
I have no hesitation in adding this to the 'must buy' list so that the senior students and staff of the school can enjoy it as much as I did. This is a gripping read that will be sure to grip its readers whether they are fans of this genre or coming to it for the first time through our now-thriving school library recommendation system. Thanks so much for allowing me to review it!

I really really wanted to like this book but struggled to finish it. Will try again later as I think that it was me and the time rather than the books fault.

I think there is something very appealing about books with the names of the characters in the title. Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves spoke to me of the people within, it made me curious as to what their story would be.

Elsie Boston lives at Starlight and runs the farm there single-handedly. It's wartime and she is under more scrutiny because of the importance of farms during that period. She takes on a land girl, Miss Hargreaves, who is less a girl than a woman, with quite a back story. This character is based on the author's own grandmother, a story which is fascinating.

Over 20-30 years these two women form a strong alliance, one that we are left to draw our own conclusions about. It's a touching relationship, a happy friendship. Until something quite shocking happens to shake their very existence, something that I could never have imagined would happen.

This is a gentle, touching, yet surprising tale. So much is implied in the writing, and yet I thought it was quite easy to know just what was implied. This is a testament to Malik's writing style that she was able to achieve this.

I don't think this is a book that should be rushed, indeed it cannot be rushed. Given that it's under 300 pages I was expecting to finish it a little quicker than I did but I just couldn't plough through it and needed to give it the time it deserved.

I think I most of all enjoyed reading about the day to day lives of these ladies. They didn't have much but they made the most of what they did have and lived a simple existence. Until all of a sudden they are forced to share their private lives with the world. The final third or so of the book is set around a trial in Winchester and is slightly different in pace, for both the characters and the reader.

I enjoyed this book for the most part and found it very interesting and very well-written. Every now and then my interest waned slightly - perhaps the detail was a little bit much or it was a little too gentle for my tastes. Overall, though, it's a lovely tender love story and a very accomplished debut for Rachel Malik.

During World War II Rene walks away from her gambler husband and leaves her children with friends and family. She reinvents herself as a land girl and is billeted at Starlight Farm with Elsie Boston. They both find peace and enjoyment with each other and after they are turfed off Starlight they become itinerant farm workers travelling the country. Finally settling in Cornwall they live a life of isolation with few luxury but then Rene feels obliged to offer a home to 'Uncle' the widower of the friend who took in her youngest child. From that moment on, life changes in ways they could not predict.

Apparently this book is a heavily fictionalised account of the life of the author's Grandmother based on a few scanty facts. However that should not put any reader off - it can be read as straight fiction. The book is so beautifully written, it handles the nature of Elsie and Rene's relationship with real tact and delicacy. At the time of the setting any relationship between two women was brushed off or ignored unless made extremely overt and so it is with this book, there is no sex. Instead there is a genuine relationship built on respect and shared / separate interests, a comfortable friendship that is long-lasting and warm. Although the second half of the book is more dramatic, events are still handled extremely well. The storytelling is so gentle that the reader just seems to get enthralled before realising that time has sped by. I loved the passion for the countryside and a way of life long gone.

I found this book a little hard to get into. While this is normally a genre that I enjoy reading, I found the language quite intense. Consequently, I have not yet finished the book but wish to share my thoughts on it.
Despite my struggle with it thus far, I think the character development is well done. I feel that the story development has been slow to this point, although I am told that the pace fastens as the story develops.

Thanks Penguin Books (UK) and netgalley for this ARC.

Revelations come in this novel after you have become devoted to these two women so that you see the full picture with a open heart and mind. A story that will make you ponder the extent you'd go to save the ones you love.

Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves is such a wonderful read. Set during the second world war and beyond, it follows Rene Hargreves as she leaves her husband and children to work as a Land Girl on Elsie Boston's farm. The book follows their relationship, their changing circumstances, and the various layers of difficulty and intrigue that they face. It is beautifully written, and carefully crafted.

Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves is a heartwarming and intriguing historical novel about the relationship between the eponymous women and how an unexpected houseguest made for a drastic situation for them both. When Elsie Boston gets Rene Hargreaves as her Land Girl during the Second World War to help run her family’s farm, now entirely left under her control, she doesn’t foresee that from then on, they will share their lives together. Inspired by true details about the author’s grandmother, the novel is a character focused story of life, hardship, and a sudden crime.

After a mysterious prologue, the book starts off like a wartime home front historical novel, showing how Elsie and Rene meet and work together, but when Elsie loses her farm and they are forced to move around as farmworkers, it turns into something else, a saga of their lives together and how they end up with an uncongenial visitor and the weight of the law and the press against them. The core of the novel is the two characters, with Malik slowing building up detail about them. Rene’s past and her escape from her husband and children is classic historical novel material, but it is also at how the war could change lives in ways that would be irrevocably different when it was over. It is not a war novel however, but one more focused upon a longer span of time and on how the characters lived their lives and didn’t quite adapt to the modern world. The writing style is straightforward and detailed, building at a slow pace that really unfurls a vivid world, a world in which most other people are excluded.

This is a slowly revealed and moving novel full of small details, with an appeal that stretches beyond its historical setting to anyone who enjoys reading about characters and carefully drawn relationships. Heartwarming and at times tense, this is the kind of novel to curl up with and escape the modern world.

(Note: review will be posted on my blog, Fiendfully Reading, closer to publication date.)

I struggled to finish this book. In fact I decided not to on two occasions in the first half but then soldiered on in the hope there was a good ending. I can’t say that there was but the pace and plot picked up a little in the second half.

The story revolves around two ladies, Elsie and Rene, who first meet in 1940 as a result of war time conditions. Rene has left her husband and three children in Manchester and comes to work for Elsie in Berkshire as a Land Girl. Elsie has been left alone on the family farm following the death of her parents and three brothers and three sisters who have moved away. She's quite content with her own company and doesn't relish having Rene living there. As time goes on Elsie and Rene become good friends and their relationship deepens. We learn more about the back story of each and then halfway through the book a third person comes to stay who causes a lot of upset and disruption.

I found the first half very dull with much description about the land, animals and farming. I was also constantly trying to remember who was who as there are many characters. This is not helped that many are referred to by both their first or last names at different times, plus there are many animals with human sounding names. As one point Elsie starts referring to Rene as 'Bert' which is the same name as Elsie's brother. Thanks goodness I was reading on a Kindle so I could easily look up things such as if Ruby was a person or an animal. She was a person but her cow was Agatha. You get the drift.

The second half was easier to read, with less description and more action, but I didn't find the ending very satisfying. It just left me wanting to know more about what happened to Elsie and Rene after the 1960s. In fact, having then found out that the story is based on the author's grandmother it made me want to know the real story and not this fictionalised one. I especially wanted to hear the story of the author's mother who was abandoned before WW2 (not in 1940 as in the story).

Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves

What an astonishing story; I was captivated from start to finish.

Rachel Malik has based this fiction on research into her own family background. Set predominantly in rural England of the 1940s to 1960s, it's a moving and multi layered tale. The ladies of the title form an unlikely friendship which grows to a point where each is reliant upon the other, but for very different reasons. There are family secrets, divided loyalties and ultimately an amiable companionship where they agree to look for work and a home in Cornwall. Their idyll is shattered by the arrival of an individual whose behaviour is disruptive and difficult and events spiral out of control.

Rachel Malik's writing often has a lilting poetic quality. It's gentle and lyrical and well suited to the times and the people. Her characters are wonderfully observed, rich in detail and each is very different. She's captured the era particularly well and I was totally absorbed. It's well paced, with a few surprises along the way. A wonderfully crafted story which I really enjoyed.

My thanks to publisher, Penguin, for a review copy via Netgalley.

This is a very quiet book and much less eventful than the blurb implies: while important things do happen, the real narrative arc is more submerged, concerned with the delicate relationship between the eponymous characters and the way they are treated by the outside world.

Malik is quite perceptive about the idea of outsiders and has important things to say about material wealth vs. emotional - all the same, I found this a slow book, especially at the start, and one which needed more lyrical writing to lift it.

The story is based on the life of Rachel Malik’s own grandmother but, as she states, the book is ‘a fiction and not a speculation and it should be read as such’. Initially, it took me a while to adapt to the rhythm of the author’s writing style: ‘For they were all gone: two sisters married and third moved away; three brothers, dead such a long time ago – their names engraved on the memorial to prove it; her mother and her father as well’. However once I did, I really became immersed in the story and totally engaged with the two main characters, Rene and Elsie.

From the start, Elsie is an enigmatic character, cherishing her solitude and resisting intrusion from neighbours, seeing this as ‘encroachment’. At the same time, she has a ‘lonely power’ that proves strangely attractive to Rene: ‘Elsie wasn’t quite like other people, but that didn’t matter to Rene.’ Elsie’s strangeness is communicated in small ways, such as by gestures. When Rene first arrives at Starlight Farm: ‘She had offered her hand to Elsie, and Elsie had reached out hers but it wasn’t a greeting – Elsie had reached out as if she were trapped and needed to be pulled out, pulled free’. Gradually, they find each meets a kind of need in the other – Elsie, for companionship and a conduit to the outside world, and Rene, for refuge from her past: 'Elsie knew that Rene fitted. A stranger to be sure, but one who didn’t make her feel strange.’

The development of Elsie and Rene’s relationship over time is tenderly observed without explicitly stating its nature. Instead their growing mutual dependence is indicated by small things, like shared evenings listening to radio plays or the way they address each other: 'A "we" was creeping into their talk, sometimes an "‘us"'. Eventually, Rene shares more details about her own history and the choices she has made. The War brings tumultuous change but also new beginnings. Then a figure from Rene’s past disrupts their way of life with grave consequences that puts their life together under an unwelcome and potentially life-changing spotlight.

This book is probably not everyone’s cup of tea (not that there isn’t plenty of tea drinking in it) but I absolutely fell in love with it.

This was an excellent novel. With brilliant main characters and a wonderful plot, this book is a real page turner. I would highly recommend this book.