Frances Liardet, Una Mannion_17 and 18

I think both of these turned up in my Street Library, which is why Kindle is not getting much of my business these days. Frances Liardet's 'We Must be Brave' was lovely, literary fiction about a lost girl and a wounded young woman. Beautifully crafted and set largely in my favourite era for fiction—England during WWII—so I allowed the weepy bits. 

'A Crooked Tree' by Una Mannion was more of a challenge. When people behave badly in a novel set in 1942 I can forgive them, but when brainless teenagers and their damaged parents do dangerous, daft things in contemporary Pennsylvania I want to throw things at them. The premise is brilliant and compelling: overstretched widowed mother of five leaves 12 year old Ellen by the side of the road in a fit of pique, and it doesn't go well. I couldn't put the damn book down; my frustrated fury at the behaviour of this pack of well-meaning, self-destructive idiot kids was overcome by my need to see how it all played out.