Review: The Eights

The Eights by Joanna Miller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Its 1920 and Oxford University has admitted women students for the first time (I Must admit I found this odd because there were also older women who finally received their degrees from Oxford so how did they study?) and four young women from different walks of life are allotted rooms on staircase eight.

Otto is the youngest of four aristocratic sisters, her mother hasn't spoken to her for months after she refused to marry a wealthy acquaintance and instead chose to study maths at Oxford.

Dora is only at Oxford (despite being extremely clever) because bother her brother and her fiancé died during WW1, within two weeks of each other. She always wanted to be a wife and mother and faces an uncertain future where men are in short supply.

Beatrice is the daughter of a celebrated suffragette, her mother is very self-absorbed and alternately ignores and berates Beatrice for things she cannot change.

The fourth girl is Marianne, the daughter of a vicar in a nearby village, she returns home every other weekend and returns exhausted.

The young women navigate a strange new world, particularly strange since some of them were working during the war, so to be required to be accompanies by a chaperone and be forbidden to speak to any male student who is not their brother seems archaic.

I liked the historical detail and Joanna Miller says she did a lot of research about the era and Oxford, visiting on multiple occasions, I was just feeling there wasn't enough heart in the story - often a concern where you have four protagonists. In this case, Beatrice felt like the spare part, she didn't really have a story. Overall I felt it was a bit paint by numbers, there's the poor little rich girl, the girl with a secret, the girl who lost everything, blah, blah, blah.

I liked it but I didn't love it - if the characters had been real people I could have understood it better, but fictional characters who don't step off the page? Meh.

I received an Arc from the publisher via NetGalley.

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