Thanks to Zando | SJP Lit and NetGalley for this ARC of These Days by Lucy Caldwell.

Historical fiction isn't really my cuppa tea but it was the Belfast setting that attracted me. The author captured the place and the voices very well but unfortunately it didn't really grab me as a novel. I'm not the target audience.

Emma and Audrey are two young sisters living in Belfast during 1941. Emma, volunteering for the First Aid Corps, is secretly in love with her supervisor Sylvia. Audrey, recently engaged, is beginning to feel pangs of deep sadness at the thought of having to leave her job and become a wife and mother. The story takes place over four days during the bombing of Belfast in April of 1941. The tragedy and horror of the blitz will force Emma and Audrey to make choices that could change their lives forever.

At only 288 pages, These Days was a quick and easy read. I found the story very compelling and the writing to be engaging. These Days navigates themes of trauma, loss, grief, feminism and sexuality all through the lens of the Belfast Blitz. I would highly recommend this book!

I loved Caldwell’s short story collection, Intimacies, so I was thrilled to get into this, historical fiction about two sisters living through the Belfast Blitz in Northern Ireland during WWII. I found this deeply moving, very atmospheric, and the story feels like the author spent a lot of time researching it’s basis. Caldwell is from Belfast which comes across in her ease of descriptions of place and environment. I’m American, so in no way mean to criticize Caldwell's ability to write her own dialect, but I did occasionally find certain exclamations a bit…clumsy, I guess? Inner thoughts that felt like words a person would say externally, but probably not think internally. Even though the background is this extremely devastating historical event, there is still much focus on the individual characters and their outer lives vs. their inner desires. I do personally prefer her short stories to her novels, but I do think that’s an individual preference, not a fault of the novel. I just found the writing at times to be dragging. Also, my guess is that this is a fault of reading an arc, and will probably not be an issue in the final copy, but there was some changing of tense while following characters. Past voice would be used followed by present voice five sentences later, which just threw me off a bit.

This novel was good and very interesting. The setting in Belfast during WWII opened my eyes on what the war meant to its inhabitants. The reader could also witness the differences in the conditions of life between Ulster and Eire, theoretically neutral (but that's another story). I also enjoyed the main characters' development: how the war affected them psychologically. Two sisters and their mother struggled to find out what was really important in life. Florence, the mother reflected on the past (regrets?), while Audrey and Emma wondered about the present , the here and now. Love is the heart of their matter, if I may say. Love also has many facets... Interesting women who are also victims of the social times from the pre-war periods: how will the conditions of their lives in this war affect their future? Will they dare? A short novel, but a powerful one.
I received a digital copy of this novel from NetGalley and I have voluntarily written an honest review.

"These Days" by Lucy Caldwell is a historical fiction novel set in Belfast during World War II. The story focuses on a family, specifically two sisters, Audrey and Emma. One is engaged to be married, while the other is in a relationship with a woman. Throughout the novel, Caldwell tells the story of Belfast's survival through multiple points of view. The book vividly portrays how civilians cope with the attacks over the next two months and how this shapes their lives and thoughts about the future. I recommend this novel to fans of Sarah Waters' "The Night Watch" and Emma Donoghue's "The Pull of the Stars." Thank you to NetGalley and Zando for the ARC.

I haven’t read a Lucy Caldwell book that I haven’t liked. Her latest, These Days, was no exception! It was a fantastic read!

I really enjoyed reading this book, it had that historical fiction element that I was looking for from this type of book. I enjoyed the way the sisters were written and thought the overall concept worked well together. It had that feel that I was looking for from a historical setting and really thought it was realistic and glad everything worked overall. Lucy Caldwell has a strong writing style and enjoyed everything going on with this story.