Canary Girls by Jennifer Chiavernini is the story of Lucy, April, and Helen and their friends who work in an arsenal in London during World War I making explosive shells. They are from different backgrounds and have different motivations to take the jobs, adding powdered TNT into the shells. They were known as munitionettes and the TNT made their skin turn yellow and took the color from their hair.
April is a 19-year-old former housemaid who follows her co-worker, Marjorie, to the city and the factory for higher wages and greater freedom.
Lucy is the wife of a star footballer who is compelled to join a fighting force.
Helen is the daughter of a German professor who falls in love and marries one of her father’s promising students, who turns out to be the son of a wealthy family that owns the arsenal.
Much of the book occurs when they are all together at the factory. They form a football team for recreation and end up playing in a regular munitions league. It seemed quite fitting to be reading this during the World Cup.
I found this book to be unnecessarily long. One of the issues of historical fiction is the difference between the temporal chain and the causal chain of events. As an author, it is easy to get swept away describing the historical events that naturally follow along, day after day in a temporal chain. The characters’ experience arc are a causal chain. When a character sits next to a beautiful woman in a bar and they end of having an affair, that is a link in their causal chain - this happens because of that. Leaning on the events in the temporal chain - Wednesday happens because it comes after Tuesday - does not change the character arcs which is the point of telling a story about people.
Another problem with following the temporal chain is maintaining the point of view. How does the protagonist know how the war is going? Too often in this book Chiaverini loses that point of view, diving into a magic narrator, that relates the history to the reader. I think about 100 of those pages could have been cut.