Summer Reading: Everyone Brave is Forgiven

The first selection on my summer reading list was Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave and I was eagerly anticipating this novel (hence the reason I began with it).  Unfortunately, it fell a little flat for me (as did Little Bee, another novel by Cleave). Mary North is an eighteen year old London socialite who signs up for a job at the War Office on the day that war is declared in 1939. She wishes to be useful but she is also motivated by a need to rebel against her wealthy family. When she is assigned to be a teacher of students left behind in the evacuation, she meets and falls in love with Tom Shaw, a school administrator. She also meets Alistair Heath, Tom's roommate, and her feelings for him complicate her relationship with Tom, especially when Alistair is stationed on Malta during a brutal blockade. A romance set in war-torn London seems like it would be right up my alley but, honestly, I had a hard time engaging with the story. I would pick it up for a few minutes and then set it down again and it was a struggle just to finish it. The story felt very episodic rather than a cohesive narrative. It was mostly vignettes about Mary in London and Alistair in Malta with lots of secondary characters and secondary plots that seemed to go nowhere. The romance seemed like an afterthought rather than the focus and the reunion between Mary and Alistair (which is why I kept reading, to be honest) was disappointingly anticlimactic. While Cleave's prose is incredibly beautiful and descriptive, the dialogue between the characters is unrealistic.  They engage in witty banter rather than heartfelt communication and that made the characters rather one-dimensional and kept them at a distance. I suppose Cleave's motivation for this device was to show the British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity but it backfired with me because I didn't really care about what happened to the characters. In the end, this novel didn't really appeal to me and I wouldn't recommend it.

Note:  Have you read Everyone Brave is Forgiven?  What did you think?  I seem to be in the minority on this one.