The Things We Leave Unfinished by Rebecca Yarros *****

Are you discouraged? Read The Things We Leave Unfinished by Rebecca Yarros! Follow the love stories of Scarlett & Jameson in WWII England plus Georgia & Noah in contemporary Colorado. Beyond these two romances, there is love for granddaughters, sisters, and so much more. The book is like a warm shower, fuzzy blanket, and hot cocoa of love. (Don’t you love mixed metaphors?) I guarantee this book will chase away your blues, if only for a while.

This book is written in three parts. There are chapters set in WWII England, contemporary Colorado, and letters exchanged by Scarlett and Jameson during WWII. The chapters are interspersed, and the letters appear at the beginning of most chapters. That might seem confusing, but it isn’t. Sometimes the letters or the Colorado chapters are spoilers for the WWII timeline, but the book isn’t a mystery, it is a story of love.

Did I say, the book isn’t a mystery? The ending is a big surprise. Just when you think the author couldn’t have packed more love into 400-plus pages, the ending reveals even more.

While most of the people in this book are lovely, there are a few baddies. (1) Georgia’s mother, Eva, can’t resist abusive husbands. She abandons Georgia to be raised by her great-grandmother, Gran Scarlett. After WWII Scarlett became a famous romance author. (2) Georgia fears she is following in her mother’s footsteps when she marries and divorces Damien, definitely a baddie. Then, (3) there are Scarlett’s parents who want to marry her off to the abusive Henry Wadsworth to cash in on their titles.

The central conflict is about Scarlett’s first book which was left unfinished when she died. Eva wants the money from this book and offers it to a publisher and a movie producer. The publisher assigns the writing to Noah Harrison (a writer both Georgia and her Gran despise). The movie producer is Georgias’s ex-husband. Fortunately, Gran left the control to Georgia. It is more complicated than this, but you get the point. Read it. You’ll be glad you did.

Scarlett and her sister Constance are WAAF officers who work in the top-secret Filter Rooms. As the BBC explains: “The Filter Room was the nerve center of the Radar system. It received information from the many Radar stations... This information, needed to be instantly corrected, coordinated, and displayed on a huge map table…, in a form suitable to be passed on to the Operations Rooms. Without this essential link, the Radar information at that time could not have been used.” Once again, the world depended on women to perform calculations in the absence of computers. Whoever thought women weren’t naturals for STEM occupations! The women often had higher ranks and security clearances than the pilots. For more fascinating information: https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/53/a2093753.shtml

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