Book Review: Things A Bright Girl Can Do – Sally Nicholls

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Synopsis: 

Through rallies and marches, in polite drawing rooms and freezing prison cells and the poverty-stricken slums of the East End, three courageous young women join the fight for the vote.

Evelyn is seventeen, and though she is rich and clever, she may never be allowed to follow her older brother to university. Enraged that she is expected to marry her childhood sweetheart rather than be educated, she joins the Suffragettes, and vows to pay the ultimate price for women’s freedom.

May is fifteen, and already sworn to the cause, though she and her fellow Suffragists refuse violence. When she meets Nell, a girl who’s grown up in hardship, she sees a kindred spirit. Together and in love, the two girls start to dream of a world where all kinds of women have their place.

But the fight for freedom will challenge Evelyn, May and Nell more than they ever could believe. As war looms, just how much are they willing to sacrifice?

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I read this book AGES ago, and can’t believe I hadn’t written a review for it! I didn’t even notice until I was writing by “Best of 2017” post for tomorrow… dear lord, we know what one of my New Years Resolutions is going to be!

So yes, you guessed it, this was one of the best books I read this year!

I loved it from beginning to end. It was incredibly inspiring and powerful. I loved all of the characters and their flaws; this made the book particularly special for me – none of these people were perfect. Each one of them had faults, did questionable things and this made them even more relatable and human. Authors, take note, we want more real people in our books!

It is worth noting that the premise of this novel is only based on the Suffragette movement, and is not completely factual. The historical events involving Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett run underneath the plot of this fictional work, which creates a multi-dimensional setting. We recognise some of the bigger protests as events within the plot, yet we are following it from a perspective of fictional characters, which I feel worked particularly well.

I especially enjoyed the F/F relationship between May and Nell. It wasn’t plastered all over the synopsis or screamed about within the first few pages, which I found particularly refreshing, and it added another dimension to the roller-coaster plot. There was no sense of homophobia, or the inclusion of the relationship being motivated in any form or for “effect”, it just was. It was an accepted, and natural relationship, written beautifully and seamlessly into the plot, and was exactly the right thing to lift this novel to another height.

This was one of those books which I didn’t want to end. I wish I could keep reading about these characters and follow their lives even further. Each character was wonderfully unique and the book as a whole was gripping, moving and truly inspirational. A must read.

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