Genre: Historical fiction, Romance

Narrative Structure: Third person, Chronological

Published: 2014

Rating: 3/5

Format: Kindle

Synopsis: When her father dies, Vivien moves from Manchester to London, hoping to catch up with Jack Fox, a man who came to visit her father just before he died. Vivien quickly gets a job in a hair salon but there is no sign of Jack. Then she sees him at a fascist rally when she believed him to be Jewish. He explains to her that he is undercover in Colin Jordan’s organisation in order to find evidence that they are training men to fight.

Time on shelf: Quite a recent purchase. I bought it after the TV series which I enjoyed.

I was really looking forward to reading this. I had enjoyed the BBC series, last year. It was fast paced and about interesting events in British history that I hadn’t heard about before. However, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. Sometimes it barely felt like the same story.

I could list all the differences between the book and the TV program – for example, Vivien has lost both her parents in the book but in the TV program, they are very much alive – but to a certain extent, there are always such differences between these sorts of media. A bigger problem was the pace. It was very slow to start. There are a lot of details about Vivien’s move to London and her grief for her father. I was constantly waiting for things to really get going. Maybe if I had not watched the TV series I would have had more patience but I was expecting to get straight into the action.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that I found Vivien a bit insipid. She was obsessed with Jack. The sections of the book from her point of view are centred on a hairdressers with gossiping women and many descriptions of fashionable outfits and haircuts. I wouldn’t have categorised the TV series as a romance but a lot of the book definitely is.

Jack’s sections were better. The difficulty for him, as a Jewish man, being in a fascist organisation was well captured and he was a more rounded character than Vivien. There was also more action and the pace was more lively. I would have liked more of this side of the story and less of the romance and I think I see why they changed it for TV.

The subject matter of the book is interesting. The rise of fascism and the 62 Group fighting back was not something I was aware of. However, the romance elements, for me, took attention away from this and didn’t really add anything to the story. For once, the TV show was better than the book.