“Elegy for Eddie” - Jacqueline Winspear

(Maisie Dobbs book 9)

🐎 EFE is a bit of a departure for this series in that the victims aren’t fully likable, and the perpetrators (while thuggish, certainly) aren’t fully terrible when the prospect of WW II looms. 

🐎 The prickly, overbearing, and bossy aspects of Maisie’s personality are addressed head-on here; I found it makes it easier to like Maisie as a result.

🐎 Be prepared for loads of introspection in EFE. Maisie spends lots of time in her own mind, sorting and analyzing her feelings. I guess it’s to be expected since she is a psychologist-investigator.

🐎 At this juncture, H*tler has been in power for mere months. Churchill has been cast out as politically unpopular based on his vocal (prescient) belief that trouble was brewing with the N*zi regime, and that appeasement was a terrible plan.

🐎 Winspear fills us in on the soft politics of propaganda and persuasion hoping to wake up a population still torpid from the Great War, about the very real possibility of fighting on British soil. As the Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts details (highly recommend watching!), Americans also very much did not wish to be pulled into another overseas conflict. EFE occurs as Churchill and his few allies have realized that in the event of a (very likely war), victory will be impossible without US aid.