Review: The Girl from Bletchley Park

The Girl from Bletchley Park by Kathleen McGurl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pam is an extremely bright young woman, with a place at Oxford to study mathematics, who defers her university place to do top secret work at Bletchley Park in World War 2.

Julia is Pam's grand-daughter. She is a successful businesswoman, a wife and mother of two boys.

We see Pam leave home and start work at Bletchley Park where she has two admirers, Edwin who works with her on the Colossus project and Frank, the gardener at Woburn Abbey where the women are billeted.

In the present day, Julia is struggling with having it all, running a business from an office at the bottom of her garden, doing the work, running a house and supporting her husband and sons. Her brother decides to sell the family house in Devon which he inherited and brings a lot of family documents and photos to Julia because he knows she likes that sort of thing. When Julia has an old roll of film developed she finds photographs of her grandmother and her grandmother's friends at Bletchley Park. The family never knew that Pam had worked there during the war and Julia is intrigued to find out more.

Told in alternating time periods, this was pleasant enough, if hugely predictable and not very original. Frankly, Pam might just as well have been a typist (as she told friends and family when they asked about her job), because there was so little depth about how she allegedly used her maths and languages skills.

I would probably have given the book three and a half stars, but the end made me so angry that I deducted half a star. (view spoiler)[My takeaway was that Julia brought all her issues on herself after her business collapses, through no fault of her own, Julia turns out to be much happier with a little job and a much smaller house. her business partner and her ex-husband get away pretty much scot free and insolvency is seen as a fleeting, mildly irritating process. Julia sees no value in suing her business partner and the insolvency process is over so quickly that I question whether it was even necessary. I loath and detest novels where being an intelligent woman with a demanding job and a family is seen to be reaching for too much - why should she dumb herself down? Also, the way that her two sons change from being normal lazy, bolshie teenagers to paragons of virtue who clean their rooms and fill the dishwasher seemed to be another dig at high-flying mothers, if only you had a nine-to-five job we would be angelic children was the message I got. Blood officially boiled. (hide spoiler)]

I think the book suffered by being told from two time frames, neither was in depth, and therefore it felt a bit superficial.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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