A very good and inspiriting look at what The Women's Institutes were able to achieve to keep Great Britain going during WWII. What these women were able to do every single day for years both during and after the war is purely mind-boggling to someone from a later, much more leisurely, era.
I'd never heard of The Women's Institute before reading this book, but everything they stand for and strive to achieve makes them very much a community I'd like to be a part of if I lived in a rural part of the UK (in order to have a local institute, a town/village had to be beneath a certain population ceiling), but the amount of hard work they put in (or did during the war) is admittedly, daunting.
The book was generally well-written, although telling this story requires a lot of names and a lot places and it was a constant challenge trying to keep it all straight as names were introduced and then reappeared in later chapters. There were also enough copy-editing errors to be noticed, which is somehow especially disappointing in non-fiction; I shouldn't hold it to a higher standard, but I do.
Jambusters has whet my appetite for more narrative history of the home front during WWII and I'll be on the lookout for interesting ones. Anyone have any recommendations?