Sometimes, when the characters are good enough, stories have the luxury of meandering around without any meaningful conflict for 200+ pages. This is one of those. The first half of this book is purely scene-building and I ate up every drop. Then you have your major conflict but the following 200 pages are essentially character development, in which the only notable conflict is that WWII is one of the partial backdrops. Yet, somehow, I want to meet Vivian and listen to her for hours. This worked for me, despite its lingering pace. Maybe it’s because she never went more than a page without mentioning fabric, cocktails, or sex?