The Ship Of Brides

Warning: Spoilers, only a few.

The Ship of Brides was written by Jojo Moyes, the best-selling author of Me Before You, it was released in June of 2005 and it received a 3.8/5 on Goodreads.

The story begins in the future where an elderly woman and her granddaughter are exploring India as their last stop towards home, the woman begins to tell her granddaughter a story of the Australian brides who crossed the world to get to English soil, when they accidently come across the decommissioned HMS Victoria.

The story that the old woman tells is of the HMS Victoria which ferried over 500 brides to England after World War II ended and all other ships had already been commandeered. It was their last chance to reunite with their husbands.

We are introduced to Margaret -Maggie- O'Brian who is expecting her first child and is leaving behind three brothers and a widowed father so that she can be with her new husband. We meet Frances Mackenzie who served in the war as a nurse and finds it difficult to give up her job or any personal facts about herself or her future, perhaps because she is haunted by what she has seen. Avice Radley makes an entrance as the socialite that she is and instantly causes trouble without meaning to, it is just how she was raised to be and finally we make the acquaintance of Jean, a sixteen year old girl who is bubbly and loud and has absolutely no sense of what should and shouldn't be said aloud.

Throughout the book we are treated to the women's intimate thoughts and their different lives and pasts. I will say that I especially loved Maggie and Frances as they later became more main characters. I liked that Frances intrigued me with her quiet acceptance and mystery and that Maggie became a mother long before her baby was born.

We are shown how the war affected each of the women and men involved in this story and how they tried to cope in their different ways. We are shown just how brave those women were to cross the entire world in order to take a chance on love. We are shown just how much kindness can mean to someone who needs it and we are shown how difficult it can be to let go of the past when it follows us like an ominous shadow.

This book was an excellent read and I thoroughly enjoyed it, the plot twists were well executed and truly did twist me as I never saw them coming, not for an instant.

I have never read any novels by this author before but I shall be sure not to make that mistake again any time soon.

Thanks for reading xx