THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR by Helen Simonson

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

Beatrice arrives at a small village of Rye in Kent to be the new Latin instructor in the months leading up to the start of WW1, and settles into its community of quirky characters. The Rye setting is painted in painstakingly vivid strokes—not through breathtaking descriptions of sheer cliffs, jagged mountains, or frothing seas, but by nuance in the colors, shapes and smells of greenery, furniture, food and local peculiarities. The characters come to life, often with backstory that breaths depth into major characters, and through prose that brings to mind Downton Abbey with sharp distinctions in the classes often drawn in speech, dress, and behaviors. The jealousies, despair, triumphs, politics, and eccentricities that are the bedrock of the village roll-out in a leisurely pace in the first eighty percent of the book, but with a satisfying rhythm that kept me turning pages. The war started and the urgency matched the gravity of army situations the characters found themselves in, with tension heightened by the contrast with earlier village scenes. This book has a heavy page count, but dig in for fifty pages and just try to put it down before you find out if the girl gets her man and collects her inheritance!