"All I require is a letter of consent from your husband, giving his permission."
That quote! ⏫ 🤯 That was about a wife needing permission from her husband to open a bank account! Can you even imagine?! However, it was 1942 and a very different time, so I guess no one knew any different.
This is the second book in the Wartime Hotel series. Kitty and her friends are all still living at the Dunbar Hotel, now a storage business run by Kitty herself. In this book though, we see her diversify into letting people hold their wedding receptions in the old hotel 💒. The three friends are resourceful in how they manage to turn an old dining room into a space where love can be celebrated 💐.
In this book, the friends find themselves in all sorts of love tangles too 💕, some life-changing and some with difficult decisions to make. Throughout it all though, they stand by each other and support one another through those decisions—sometimes judging, but ultimately always there in the end 🤝. As with the last book, hope shines through ✨, and I found myself rooting for the girls, sharing in their home life and chatting around the kitchen table drinking tea ☕.
I already have the next book in the series ready to read 📚, so I will be diving in soon.
Thank you to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review Hopeful Hearts at the Wartime Hotel.
About the Book
Manchester, 1942.
When Kitty Dunbar was forced to confront her husband’s debts and close the family hotel, she transformed Dunbar’s into a storage business for bombed-out families. But with her daughter to support, and relishing her new independence, Kitty is keen to come up with more ways to use the once prestigious hotel.
Sharing her home are former chambermaid Lily, and kind-hearted welfare worker Beatrice, both haunted by past loss. Together, the three women create a new kind of family in the heart of the Manchester one built on respect and resilience. When Kitty suggests hosting wedding receptions in the old dining room, her friends are happy and willing to lend a hand – and help to serve ‘Dunbar’s Wartime Wedding Punch’!
But when Lily meets a handsome doctor, and Beatrice comes face to face with an old flame, will hearts finally be mended, or broken once more?
While war rages around them, can these three women find the courage to keep fighting for their dreams?
About Maisie
Maisie Thomas is the author of the new Wartime Hotel series published by Boldwood. The first two titles will be published in 2025. The stories concentrate on the importance of female friendship, especially when those friendships come about unexpectedly, and the ways in which women support one another through the highs and lows of everyday life in wartime.
Maisie is also the author of the bestselling Railway Girls saga series about the brave women and girls who worked on Britain's railways in WW2. She also writes as Susanna Bavin and Polly Heron. As Polly, she writes the 1920s saga series, The Surplus Girls, about young women striving for independence in the aftermath of the First World War. As Susanna she has written four stand-alone sagas (The Deserter's Daughter, A Respectable Woman, The Sewing Room Girl and The Poor Relation) and a WW2 saga series, The Home Front Girls.
Maisie was born and brought up in Manchester, which provides the location for her novels. She now lives on the beautiful North Wales coast with her husband and their two rescue cats.
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