My Review of "The Tea Planter's Wife"

Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife is a fun novel that vividly depicts the 1920s.  Gwendolyn Hooper, her 19-year-old heroine, speaks for an empire-branded breed of gutsy young British women who left the security of England to embark on extraordinary adventures abroad.  Not the back-packing, "lonely planet" travels of today, gap-year kids constantly connected with the folks back home via internet and smartphones, and usually safely and predictably back home for good inside a year.  Girls like Gwen married men who made their living and fortunes out in the colonies -- or what until very recently had been colonies -- and went out to join them, standing shoulder-to shoulder with their husbands to face down hardship, danger, disease, monsoon, drought, and not least the simmering and sometimes murderous resentment of locals.

That makes The Tea Planter's Wife so much more than a love story -- it's a recognition that girls like Gwen had guts, and commitment, and a willingness to take risks.  They were deeply impressive.

And Jefferies' telling of Gwen's story is an impressive novel that you won't want to put down.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.