Spring Awakening

Spring Awakening by T.J. Brown, 2013 Gallery Books

     Prudence has travelled to London with her new husband, Rowena has agreed to marry her friend Sebastian Billingsly, and Victoria has decided to make her way as a lady bachelor. The Buxton women have grown stronger and grown apart since their London home was taken from them and their estrangement at Summerset Abbey. But there is more at stake for the three women and the people they care for when the first World War begins.
     Prudence has fallen in love with her husband Andrew Wilkes. When he volunteers to fight, Prudence finds she is expecting their first child. The stress of her changed circumstances is minimal compared to the blow their relationship when she asks the Buxtons that he be stationed somewhere relatively safe. Andrew thinks Prudence lacks faith in him, but Prudence just wants her husband to come home.
     Rowena and her cousin Elaine remain at home while Victoria moves to London and most of the men in the Cunning Coterie join the war in Europe. While Elaine is held under her mother's thumb, Rowena recovers from her disaster of an affair with the young pilot, Jon. While tacking together plans for her wedding to Sebastian she begins to ferry planes across the Isles for the British government.
     Away from her family in London, Victoria repeatedly rejects Kit Kittredge's marriage proposals. When he reveals he will be joining the covert war effort Victoria realizes she will lose her best friend. Victoria distracts herself in work as a volunteer nurse, even joining the Red Cross in France. The youngest Buxton girl discovers sometimes it isn't worth losing the respect and love of a friend to have it all.
     The Buxton girls find their lives have been leading them in separate directions toward the same end. Rowena and Victoria aid the war effort more directly, and Prudence becomes an anchor as many women of her time were forced to become. Through love and loss each woman learns to blaze her own trail, but finds her way back to the family who left London at Sir Philip's death. Spring Awakening is a historical novel weaving fact together with fiction. Older readers will enjoy the nuance and complex love lives which follow Rowena, Prudence, and Victoria to the series' conclusion.