The Linen Queen

The Linen Queen by Patricia Falvey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Life has not been kind to Sheila McGee in her Northern Irish home which overlooks The Irish State across the Lough. Her father left her and her mother forcing them to move in with a sour minded aunt and her drunken husband. Sheila is a mill girl and she dreams of leaving all of this behind and escaping to England. When she wins the contest that makes her the Linen Queen, picked from a gaggle of girls from linen mills across the land, she sees the prize money as the first step to freedom. But one needs papers to leave the country and she has none. It is the first days of WW II and her second chance at freedom arrives in the influx of Yank troops from America.
Despite her close friend, Gavin a resident of the free State and his obvious love for her, Sheila decides that an attachment to a Yank officer might be her ticket to America. She finds him in Joel Solomon, a Jewish captain. Through Joel and the involvement of Gavin with the IRA --a association he made to help her and a placement child from the slums of Belfast--Sheila begins to grow and mature from a flighty, self-centered teen to a mature, caring woman.
Her transition and the story of the Neutral Irish State and the British Northern Island in the face of Hitler's assault on the world, the story of the Catholic Church's reign over its faithful, the involvement of the Yanks and the young women whose town they now occupy intertwine to produce an engrossing historical novel. One in which the characters and the place come to life and draw in the reader who, with Sheila, learns that wherever you go and with whomever you find yourself, the person you always bring along is yourself. Sometimes when you change, the place and people you've always known, somehow are the things you most cherish.

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