Saplings

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. I was struck that although the jacket copy emphasizes this as a novel that shows the devastating effects of war on children, the destruction of the family comes about not truly through war (something else could have caused a similar trauma), but through the selfishness and narcissism of the children's mother. Evacuation isn't even necessary for them to be separated, as she shuffles them off to boarding school as fast as possible so she can pursue her own proclivities. Her need of them as ornaments and reinforcements for her own self-image is sharply portrayed, forming a devastating, disturbing portrait of a woman utterly without self-knowledge or caring for how her actions affect those around her.

Members of a privileged class, the children remain somewhat elevated above the worst deprivations of wartime, and certainly far above what children on the continent were suffering. I found them quite unlikeably spoiled at times, as they threw fits about trivial things like having to sleep in a different room than they were used to or having to share a desk with another child in an overcrowded school. But such “poor little rich child” problems were ultimately signs of their deeply insecure, unstable foundation, their lack of real mother-love.

It's a sad, bitter story, one I wish had ended differently – not necessarily in a happier way, but in stronger and less fragmented way. The characters still haunt me even as I'm frustrated by how they dissolve into sketchiness, and I'm glad to have read this book even if I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. It casts light on a side of Streatfeild's writing life of which I would otherwise have remained ignorant, and which brings an interesting dimension to her sometimes one-sided tendencies.