This didn't hit me quite as hard as the first book in the series, but I still really enjoyed it. Maisie continues to be deeply entertaining, but I think what impresses me most about these books is how unwilling they are to let generational trauma lie. It's 1930, or thereabouts, and the effects of WW1 are still (as they were in the first book) having an enormous impact on society. Well it was the Great War then, wasn't it? The war to end all wars, and they had no clue that worse was to come. And Winspear lets the effects of that horrifying experience ripple throughout society, and no-one is immune. Which is the way, of course, that it must have happened. I don't know if every book in this series has the trauma of WW1 embedded in it, but the first two have, and I find them terribly sad and terribly fascinating. The first book, which focused on soldiers who had suffered immense disfigurement, was one thing, but the focus here is quite different... yet still, of course, connected.

I don't know what it was that made some women try to shame young men into signing up for slaughter with their gifts of white feathers, but I can only hope that a) they were not aware of the monstrosity of their actions when they did them, and b) that they became aware afterwards, and regretted it to the end of their days. Such is the case here, and Maisie is confronted with a case that asks, essentially, how does a person go on from that? How can they do something so terrible, something which they must have thought, in some way, was right, and how can they live with themselves after? I don't know. I just know that they did have to live with it.