A romantic story set in England during World War I takes us through the life of young Peggy, who stands up against class differences and decides to fight her way through the world of education and independence as a woman.
The story introduces us to the lives of twins Peggy and Maude, who look exactly the same on the outside, but couldn’t be more different on the inside.
This book was more of a disappointment than a success for me. The author failed to pull me into the subject matter with her descriptions and plot, and she didn’t even get me to a point where I could sympathize with any of the characters. Especially not with the main character, Peggy, but we’ll get to that later. First off, I have to say that I love reading about the world wars, but I feel like the author couldn’t convey the feelings of war to the reader. I understand that the First World War itself wasn’t the main focus of the plot. On the other hand, war and its aftermath carry an incredible grimness, which I could barely notice in this book at all. The execution of the book felt lighthearted to me. I struggled through almost the entire book until a single moment when Tilde wrote a letter to Peggy from France about the German soldiers. In it, she pointed out that German soldiers are also just human beings who cry for their homes and mothers whom they will never see again.
           Regarding Maude, I have to say that a lot of people underestimated her, especially her own sister, who often made me feel like she was the one who needed Maude to get by, not the other way around. Maude probably suffered from some form of autism, but she wasn’t stupid. She was quite talented and intelligent, she just showed it in a different way that the people around her had to learn to understand.
The character of Peggy was interesting to me at firstâa character trying to move forward in academic life, which was truly difficult for a woman in that period. I approved of her decision to volunteer at a makeshift hospital. At that point, I told myself she had potential.
As I kept reading, Peggy became more and more of a mystery to me. For some reason, I couldn’t sympathize with her. She has a hard life, there’s no denying that, especially since she has to take care of her sister, but in many cases, she just seemed borderline weird to me. I really understood that she wanted to enjoy some time alone with her company after so many years spent with Maude, but the way she handled it wasn’t okay with me. I disagreed with several of her decisions.
There was one trait of hers I could relate to, and that was that she didn’t always know how to react or what to say. But let’s be honest, she was rude to all the other characters more often than she was just at a loss for words. Throughout the whole book, the other characters only wanted to help her, but she just kept telling them to get lost.
Peggy is incredibly rude, annoying, and has prejudices against everyone.
I was so irritated by her whole character, and I could barely finish the last fifty pages. The book had potential, but I feel like it wasn’t executed well enough. As I mentioned above, I get that the war wasn’t the main theme of the story, but in my opinion, the author didn’t handle the characters wellâwell, the main character, at least…