Ambivalent Ambos

The wonderful world of books! You learn new things and visit new places, not accessible in any other way. How grateful you feel.

In this case, for instance, who would have thought that those Blitz ambulances were manned by gay women, and that their private lives & loves would be so vividly documented by the liquid prose of Miss Waters, who has mined the lesbian seam (as it were) so effectively in recent years.

She does write exceptionally well, but this is a long book, over 500 pages, and the last 100 or so pages are quite an effort, the more so as chronologically speaking they are actually the first 100 pages. One was tempted to go back to the beginning and see how it all fits in... as it were.

But this reader proved rather better at resisting temptation than Helen, Julia, Kay, Vivian and the rest.