This book was on a large table at Barnes & Noble Bookstore, along with numerous others with adoption and/or orphan stories, several set in Europe during World War II. This one seemed intriguing and stated it was a “USA Today Bestseller.” It turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. It could have been a great book, but the writing was uneven in quality, the research seemed sloppy, and parts of it were not believable, novel or not.

The author lives in England, where the story is set, but she seems to have been less than familiar with some of the locations where it takes place. The book uses the British style of punctuation, which makes sense as it is published in England, but still omits a lot of needed commas and has far too many run-on sentences. Perhaps that is not a problem for some casual readers, but these reviewers are an English major and a librarian! Aside from those minor complaints, there are some glaring errors that a proofreader should have picked up, like using the word “too” instead of “two,” or “heckles” when it should have been “hackles.” Repeated descriptions of her “milking the heifers,” when anyone familiar with cattle would know that heifers, by definition, do not have milk; a heifer is a young female cow who has not had a calf, and therefore does not have milk. The book’s hero was milking those heifers for a year or so!

The little girl in the story was supposedly playing “Moonlight Sonata” flawlessly at 4½ years old; a child that young would not have hands large enough to play some of the chords in that piece. She also goes off to school, by herself, every day, at that age, which would have been unlikely in 1938 in Coventry, England. Yet, she does not spell nor write well several years later. Her parents turn out to have been German spies, yet no one detected any German accent in their speech, which was also difficult to believe.

As the story progresses, the main character returns to her farm in Cornwall (where she milks the cows, which have all been abandoned for some months and then buys the heifers she milks!) and the child becomes hers to raise, the German parents having died in separate bombings. She obtains a piano for this young prodigy, but nothing is said of how one gets a piano in rural Cornwall in 1940, let alone how it got tuned after moving it in the back of a truck. Finally, at the end, she adopts the child in a questionable manner, marries the Canadian military pilot she met early in the story, and they all get on a ship, which leaves from Cornwall and sails directly to Vancouver, Canada, where they will keep the adoption secret forever, and live happily ever after.

Most ships in 1942 were assigned to do military tasks, passenger ships generally leave from further east or north in England, and one cannot sail directly from Western England to Western Canada! There is a very wide continent of Canada to traverse by land! Surely the author could have known that had she looked at a map or a globe.

One is also left wondering why the child’s adoption should be forever a secret, aside from the fact that her birth parents were apparently German and there was, admittedly, a great deal of fear and animosity concerning Germans at that time.

As there were few or no papers attesting to the child’s birth or parentage, one wonders how she suddenly signs “all the papers” to adopt her and leaves the next day for Canada with her new husband and the child.

In short, sloppy research, as well as sloppy editing and proofreading, made this book seem like something put together hurriedly, on a computer by an amateur; more of a romance novel than good historical fiction.