The Kew Gardens Girls at War

Lovell follows up her WWI-era The Kew Gardens Girls with an emotional story of a new generation of brave Britons. It’s 1940 and newlywed Daisy Cooper—whose mother, Ivy, and godmother, Louisa, were among the women who took up men’s jobs at Kew Gardens during WWI—has just sent her dashing RAF pilot husband, Rex, to fight the Germans when she’s invited to Kew Gardens to work as a gardener. There, she’s paired with elegant nurse Beth Sanderson, who longs to be a doctor—but her physician father Geoffrey refuses to sign the necessary papers for her to start training. Through their work, Daisy and Beth become fast friends—and then Daisy, who recently learned she is pregnant, receives word that Rex has been killed in action. Beth, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a Jamaican cardiologist and must contend with her father’s racism and bigotry, not to mention that of society at large. The horrible reality of war is on full display in this engrossing story, which Lovell enhances with a visceral sense of bombs falling and terrible news arriving via telegrams. This has “movie option” written all over it. (Apr.)