Thank you to Firefly Press for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Publishing on 4 May with Firefly Press, Digging For Victory follows twelve-year-old Bonnie as her family host the mysterious Mr Fisher while her brother’s away at war. She worries he must be a shirker or, worse, a spy – and wants to set about proving it.
It took me a while to warm up to this book, but once I liked it, I liked it a lot. It’s a bit of a slow starter – for a while I found the verse style it’s written in a little bit jarring. There are points where it works well – Bonnie’s description of a zoetrope in which the words form the shape of one is especially pleasing to the eye – but others where it’s worth questioning whether the verse benefits the entire book. Personally, I would’ve preferred a book without the verse format, with the occasional chance for the words to take shapes – but as I’m unsure how this would look on the page without some rather erratic spacing I can understand why it doesn’t happen here. (Another slight nitpick was that at times the verses try to rhyme and at others they don’t at all – a commitment to one or the other makes for smoother reading.)
In addition, Bonnie takes her time in becoming a likeable character. Despite the development she undergoes throughout the book, she gets to be obnoxious for quite a few pages beforehand – some of her early internal monologue reads like a Second World War propaganda machine. There is endless talk against shirkers (or ‘conchies’, as she calls them) and a line about swapping her spade for a gun that feels a little bizarre coming from the mouth of a twelve-year-old.
However, this is a story about illusions, and just as many other people in the book – Mr Fisher, Bonnie’s friends, and even the loathed ‘conchie’ – are not all that they seem, neither is Bonnie. As the story progresses, her internal thoughts become less frustrating to read – she finds her feet both as a character and in her dialogue. She becomes rather easy to root for, in fact – as does Mr Fisher.
Mr Fisher is really the catalyst for this book becoming a four-star review – without giving too much away, he’s one of the most complex and interesting characters within the story, and it is his interactions with Bonnie that lend the book a rather warm quality. That and Bonnie’s efforts in the garden, which are wonderfully and poetically described. When the words are arranged on the page in the same shape as growing stems or seed beds, the verse style really comes into play. When the action ramps up, the flow of this style actually works better than full-length prose text in terms of maintaining a good flow and conveying the fast-paced events taking place.
So just as Bonnie has to admit that people are not what she first thought they were, I too have to admit that this book, although a slow starter, really put roots down in my heart.