Review: "A Little Love Song" by Michelle Magorian

A Little Love Song by Michelle Magorian
Published 1991
★★★★

Good Night, Mr. Tom was my favourite book for approximately an age after I first read it in middle school, and I've meant for years to give A Little Love Song a go. In it, Rose and her older sister are off to the seaside for the summer, out of the way of war. It's meant to be a quiet few months for them, but they—Rose in particular—have some growing up to do.

Here's what's interesting about Rose: she and her sister, Diana, have grown up with some amount of money and privilege. They're sheltered: they barely know how to boil water. And when Diana befriends a young woman who is unmarried and pregnant, Rose is borderline appalled. She...doesn't know what she doesn't know, basically. Rose manages to learn that particular lesson fairly quickly (and redeems herself when it counts), but throughout the book she comes up, again and again, against her naïveté. She hasn't learned to judge what sorts of boys are worth her time and effort, and some of the decisions she makes are accordingly inadvisable. But that's what's great about the book: Rose makes these decisions, and then she lives with them. Nobody swoops in at the last moment to save her from her naïveté.

All's well in the end, of course. Readers will see some of it (e.g., the intersection between Hilda's story and Rose's) coming, but there's plenty to keep a reader on her toes. I wish I'd read this ten or fifteen years ago (when I was, you know, younger and less jaded...or something like that), but I'm glad it survived my bruised and battered to-read list.