A charming and nostagic read, perfect for fans of Coronation Street and readers who love Fiction set in times past.
Vera Sharples, the over-protected daughter of Ena Sharples, longs for independence, and while her mother wants to marry her off, she isn’t keen on Bob Lomax, Vera’s own choice for matrimony. Her friend, Lily Longhurst, has found herself on the wrong side of a doomed romance and decides it’s high time that she and Vera take their lives into their own hands.
With Ena unable to deny her daughter the chance to do her bit for King and Country, the girls sign up for the Land Army, where life is very different from the familiar cobbles of Coronation Street.
But even with her daughter far away down South, Ena can’t stop meddling in Vera’s life and hatches a plan that will could put paid to all of Vera’s hopes … will the two plucky Lancashire lasses come home to Coronation Street with their dreams intact, or is Ena about to shatter them forever…?
I really enjoyed this book. I love war time settings and this combined with seeing characters I remember from my childhood in their younger days. The younger girls are keen to escape from family restraints on Coronation Street but sign up to be Land Girls without realising just how tough a life they are signing up for. City girls found themselves totally immersed in country life with huge farm animals to contend with and backbreaking work. It was great to learn more about the land girl experience combining with a Corrie background.
The Land Girls from Coronation Street is a page-turning story that follows two girls from Manchester as they become Land Girls down in Kent. It must have been a terrible shock to the system for someone who had never been near a cow in her life, and I really felt for them! The author must have done an awful lot of research as it all felt very real and I completely empathised with Vera and Lily and all the other girls. I couldn't believe how harshly they were treated considering the fact that they had volunteered to do that work, but I suppose times were different then and everyone had to be tough. There are horrible mothers and villainous boyfriends to contend with as well, and I was rooting for the girls all the way. A great read!
Another brilliant instalment of the coronation street series of books I loved how Vera decided to get away from her mother’s controlling clutches and become a land girl the freedom she got from that was amazing and so nice to read she learnt and grew So much better away from the controlling environment her mother made such a nice story
It seemed strange at first to encounter some familiar names such as Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner and to find them twenty years younger than the characters we meet in the early episodes of Coronation Street. But the main characters here are the daughters of Ena and of her friend Martha Longhurst: Vera and Lily. They work as land girls on a farm in Kent and are not as safe from the bombing as one might imagine. I'm struck mainly about how naive they are, especially Vera who is actually older than Lily. Maggie Sullivan gets right up close to the characters and makes us care. A nice light read.
A strong outing for the wartime Corrie series as Vera and Lily escape their hum drum lives to become Land Girls in Kent. With a largely more rural setting, this feels more like the Emmerdale series (not a bad thing). The ending is a little rushed.
I loved the story about Vera and Lily becoming land girls also the memories of Ena,Martha and Minnie,I used to feel sorry for Minnie she was frightened of Ena in the tv programme