"Yours Cheerfully" continues the story of Emmy Lake, the plucky narrator of A.J. Pearce's 2018 debut novel, "Dear Mrs. Bird." In that book, Emmy had hoped to become a war correspondent but instead landed a part-time job opening mail for an advice columnist at a women's magazine. There, she secretly responded to the letters that Mrs. Bird, the columnist, rejected — with disastrous results.
In this sequel, it is a few months later, Mrs. Bird has moved on, Emmy is promoted, and, while the Blitz is mostly over, World War II continues to wreak havoc on London.
"Yours Cheerfully" starts out slowly, with various staff meetings (primarily to bring the reader up to date, I'm guessing — lots of exposition in those conversations) and a gathering of editors at the government's Ministry of Information.
There, the Ministry calls on women's magazines to help the war effort by encouraging their readers to enter the workforce. "We need older women, married women, mothers, even grandmothers, to volunteer for jobs, especially in munitions production," the government official tells them, which makes Emmy feel so important and patriotic that the hairs stand up on her neck.
"I had always hoped to be a journalist, but I had never dreamt it would involve being part of a campaign like this," she says.
While Emmy accepts the challenge with her usual enthusiasm, she soon discovers problems that the government has not addressed. Many of the workers are young mothers whose husbands are off fighting the war, and factories — running 24 hours a day — don't offer child care and don't take the schedules of single mothers into consideration.
Emmy travels by train to a factory outside of London to interview women for a series of stories, but things don't always go well — the bosses treat her with disdain, some of the women are fired for speaking out, and one is fired for bringing her children to work because she has no one to watch them.
Emmy, her friend Bunty and some of the factory women concoct a plan to hold an informational picket to raise awareness of the need for child care.
Meanwhile, Emmy's fiancé, Charles, is about to be deployed and he manages to get a day's leave so that he and Emmy can hastily be married. But the only day and time the wedding can take place is, of course, the precise hour of the picket.
With the trains running at unpredictable times due to the war and with Charles' leave time ticking away, will Emmy miss her own wedding? This kind of madcap drama certainly adds to the fast pace of the second half of the book, but it's not at all necessary. There's plenty going on here without it.
Emmy's spirited narrative voice was one of the hallmarks of "Dear Mrs. Bird," and in the sequel her voice remains chipper but is slightly toned down, and rightly so. She's not as naive and idealistic as she was six months ago. She's grown more serious and responsible, and she understands she needs to walk a fine line between following the dictates of the Department of Ministry and helping the factory mothers.
As with "Dear Mrs. Bird," the women in this book are far more interesting than the men. In the previous book, Bunty's fiancé was killed by a bomb, and I'm not sure I would grieve too much should Charles someday meet the same fate. I don't mean to be callous — he seems nice enough, but he is, as the saying goes, weak tea to Emmy's strong coffee.
But perhaps that is one of the points of the book — that the war propelled women out of their traditional roles and into the mess of life, while the men kept a stiff upper lip and carried on.
Laurie Hertzel is senior editor for books at the Star Tribune. @StribBooks
Yours Cheerfully
By: A.J. Pearce.
Publisher: Scribner, 304 pages, $26.
