Blog Tour - The Abandoned Daughter - Mary Wood

Mary Wood is one of my favourite authors and I'm always excited to hear that she has a new book coming out. The Abandoned Daughter is the second book in The Girls Who Went To War series, and it's an absolute gem!

The year is 1918 and Armistice day is on the horizon. Ella is a volunteer nurse who has recently been betrayed in the cruelest way but she knows that she has to put aside her own personal agony and concentrate on tending to the urgent needs of the injured and dying soldiers that are being brought from the nearby battlefield at an alarming rate. It's under these devastating conditions that she meets Paulo, a French officer who will play a significant part in her future.

When the war is over Ella returns to London, only to find that things aren't as hopeful back home as she had envisaged, the war might have ended but for many the future is bleak. She always tries to help others where she can but she is also desperate to find out more about her birth family as maybe they can be of some help and comfort to her when things take another dramatic twist for her.

As always, I raced through this book, reading it whenever I got the opportunity. I knew that Mary Wood was going to put me through the mill and leave me an emotional wreck - but I wasn't expecting to end up there after only the first few chapters!

Ella was such a beautiful soul and it was so easy to get behind her character and I was literally crossing my fingers that her fortunes would change and fast. I didn't know how much more she (or me as a reader) could take. Mary always manages to create a wonderful mix of characters in her books and The Abandoned Daughter was no exception. I was delighted to catch up with some of the characters from the first book in the series, The Forgotten Daughter and the way that they fitted in so seamlessly. The atmosphere of the book was full of highs and lows, the celebration of the end of the war but the extreme poverty and demoralisation of the soldiers and their families on their return home, but through it all it demonstrates the resourcefulness, kindness and friendship of the people at that time.

The Abandoned Daughter is another triumph of a book from this hugely talented author and one that I would highly recommend to all fans of family saga's and historical fiction.

You  can follow the rest of the blog tour with these fabulous blogs:

With kind thanks to author Mary Wood and Ellis Keene at Pan Macmillan for my review copy.