Kissed a Sad Goodbye by Deborah Crombie

I'm not sure what all the historical information about Isle of Dogs was for. I had never heard of it, and it was interesting, but I'm not sure how it really advanced the cause.

This was a generational thing, the animosities all began with shared guilt from the war years and the children evacuated from London. The scene where the children are being picked over like vegetables in the market was remarkably similar to the scene in the Kate Morton book The Distant Hours where the child of the story is left unpicked until the very end. I suppose that these are at least somewhat accurate representations of the events. It had never occurred to me to wonder how the children were actually placed when they arrived in villages across England. I had sort of vaguely assumed some sort of billeting system was in place. Apparently, they loaded the kids on buses and at their destinations they were treated rather like slaves at auction. Siblings were separated and the prettiest were chosen first. Since the evacuation plan had been in place for some time, I would have expected a little more organization at the receiving end, although in this story, the children were sent home from school with orders to be back in an hour to get on the buses. It made me remember the bomb drills at school during the fifties. We went to school on a military installation - we only had one type of drill - go out and get on buses. We were supposed to get on the buses by neighborhood, rather than grade, so our mothers could find us wherever we were taken, but I have to wonder how it would have ended up if it had ever come down to that.

The two stories are told in tandem rather than sequentially, which was a little confusing at first. It took a while for it to be clear that the people of the historical story were characters in the current time story. And this time Crombie started with that business of introducing all the characters separately each in his or her own little vignette, and I'm not sure she was completely successful in drawing everything into a tight narrative. With school starting next week, I guess I am getting a little impatient - I know that my reading time is going to be significantly shortened.

In the continuing saga, Duncan has gravely disappointed his newly discovered son, and Gemma has started piano lessons. Their relationship seems to have encountered complications which will require some redefinition.