The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies takes place in Wales during the end of WWII. In the course of this story, several different stories take place. There is the Welsh girl who is coming to terms with carrying a baby after an English soldier rapes her. There is the German soldier in the POW camp in Wales who is coming to terms about what the war is really about. There is a connection between the girl and the soldier. And there are other perimeter stories that are happening as well.
I found the story lines intriguing but was disappointed by the ending. There were too many pieces left undone.
Quotes of interest from the book:
…What was it to be forced to do something she didn’t want to do? She’d been forced all her life by one circumstance or another – by poverty, by her mother’s death, by the needs of the flock. Being forced to do things is such a part of her daily life…
She tries to decide how she feels about the Germans now. It seems important. She ought to hate them, she thinks, and she supposes she does, but she can’t quite muster the heat of anger. She doesn’t know them, after all; whatever they’ve done, it doesn’t feel like they’ve done it to her.
…Of course he’d been thinking of German planes. But what he really wants to say is that he’d been thinking of freedom. The freedom he’d heard in the planes overhead, the freedom he felt thinking of the toy planes, something from the camp, something he’d made there, existing outside of it, outside of his reach, his sight.
…Now it’s as if he’s rechristened in death, as if Arthur and the rest have created a Rhys they can mourn.
Are we who we think we are, or are we who others judge us to be?
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