Every Time We Say Goodbye | Natalie Jenner

This was a tough one for me, since I enjoy almost every WWII story with a strong female protagonist. This is the third in a series of books that started with The Jane Austen Society, followed by Bloomsbury Girls. I read these two first books quite a while ago and frankly, didn't put them all together as a series until I read that this was the case. All to say that I was a little underwhelmed by this book.

The main character, Vivien Lowry, has so much potential and does a lot of incredibly interesting things with her life. A writer, she heads off to Italy after her West End play bombs and works as a script writer. There's a lot of interesting historical information about the history of Italian film making and Vivien meets a lot of big (really big) names along the way. She's also leaving England because her fiancee David was missing from the war, presumed dead, and she was recovering from that, setting off to try to find out what happened to him. She meets a number of interesting people who have fascinating and horrifying refugee stories, has a love interest with a backstory, a movie star-friend with an entirely different back story than you'd expect, and more. So there's a lot going on.

The story is told with two timelines -- 1955 and 1943. Ordinarily I love this technique but given the number of characters and stories, I found it a bit much to keep track of. The book appears to be very well-researched and the subject matter is certainly compelling, but it just didn't land with me in the way that it seemed to land with almost every other reviewer I found. I guess that happens, right?