The Girl from the Channel Islands ~ Jenny Lecoat

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Title: The Girl from the Channel Islands

Author: Jenny Lecoat

Original Language: English

First Published as: Hedy’s War in the UK in 2020, The Viennese Girl in Australia and as Hedy in Argentina.

This edition: Published in 2021, in North America by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A. I received the uncorrected Proof not for sale by Harlequin Books in return for an honest review through goodreads.

Jenny Lecoat

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Jenny Lecoat was born fifteen years post world War II in Jersey, Channel Islands. The islands were a mere few miles away from the french coast in the British territory which was under Nazi Occupation. Lecoat was brought up in a war ravaged city unaware of the traumas of its past where her family on both sides had been extremely involved in the resistance activity. She was interested in story writing from an early age and moved to England at the age of 18 to take a drama degree. She did standup comedy and wrote magazines and newspaper articles, presented tv and radio shows before taking screenwriting seriously. She is a qualified teacher of English as a Foreign language. This is Lecoat’s first novel.

The Girl from the Channel Islands

This novel has been inspired by true events of World War II over the island of Jersey of the famous Channel Islands. It was the summer of 1940 when Hedy Bercu, a young Jewish girl who had fled Vienna, Austria to escape the Nazis had come to Jersey. Little did she know the complications of politics when the Germans decided to invade the beautiful Channel Islands, the only part of Britain that the Germans occupied and Churchill conveniently abandoned. Hedy confronted the hostile forces both in her homeland and her place of work. Her boon was her command over both English and German languages because of which she could sustain the job of a translator with the enemy for a while. Working for the enemy wasn’t easy just as she had predicted but it gave her liberty to perform some personal acts of resistance in which a German officer with love in his heart was her aide. It wasn’t long before the Germans caught her sense and became hungry for her blood. Trying to simply stay alive she ran, hid and stayed low with the help of Kurt, her German lover and her best friend Anton’s wife Dorothea Le Brocq. Together they made her invisible covering her tracks, lying to the public, watching out for the German hounds. The fear of being caught on account of her ethnicity or for her little acts of resistance kept her shivering all the while, not mentioning the meagre food she had access to.

My Take

WWII novels mostly make me nauseous just as this one did. Something that distinguishes The Girl from the Channel Islands is that it provides with a fresh perspective to courage, bravery and above all hope of survival in the brutalized people when everything was lost to them. Hedy’s pure grit and zeal to never give up is what kept her going when so much was going on around her that there were times when she wasn’t sure she would see daylight again. The story has a dramatic tension about it even though there is not much resistance or war crime portrayed. This is about the psychological pressure that the people of Jersey were in gradually being deprived of everything that they needed to survive while Churchill was keeping a blind eye to it. The five years that the German’s were in control, the people of Jersey were left to basic survival. There was no food, no aid, no help and nothing was in sight too that they could hang on to any hope. Another aspect is the romance that blossomed between Hedy and Kurt amidst all the chaos and running which is such a human win given the conditions. The emotional turmoil, the difference of ethnicity, the heartbreaks, the emotional conflicts and the reunions between them are quite goofy yet melancholic at times.

There have been bursts of rage and puddles of tears while I read this book. Books like these are like a reality check where we are hit hard in the head comprehending how granted we take life to be that it moves and turns at our beck and call but so much depends on fate, on when and where we are, on who we are. Fighting the enemy all the while hiding from them, running of fear of discovery, racing against time to evade being sent to a concentration camp is all so nightmarish and yet it was someones truth and someones today with all lost hope of tomorrow. My heart goes out to the horrifying reality of those who witnessed one of the bloodiest eras in human history.

The authors connection to the setting of the novel and her family’s history in which some of her relatives may have been summoned for the macabre consequences of that time would have given her the motivation to write this historical fiction narrative. I have read a few WWII books which are based in Germany, Poland, Slovakia, France and other places. Jersey was the only British Island occupied by the Nazi and I had recently read The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society a novel written by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer which made me interested in this narrative. The in depth research by the author coupled with the history she had access to has defined the novel and given a voice to the people of Jersey who were an insignificant minor in the global conflict.

The Girl from the Channel Islands is a wonderfully written Historical Fiction novel which keeps you on the edge and tickles you with tears and foreboding throughout. Hedy’s contributions for her people in all the adversities that she could think of is a tale of resilience, bravery and love in circumstances of impossible proportions. I could feel Hedy’s fears, her grit, her perseverence and zeal to live all the while my head was in the book and even after that, such strong is the writing by Jenny Lecoat. It is a tale of heroes from the past who may never be known to us, hence novels like this. It is a brilliantly written story which compels you to think what ethical boundaries would you be willing to cross to keep bay the moral qualms in the name of survival.