Star by Star by Sheena Wilkinson - Review and Blog Tour

Hello and welcome to my blog for my stop on the tour for Star By Star by Sheena Wilkinson! It is a pleasure to welcome you here. Please do click around and have a look at my other reviews. 

I was really intrigued by the premise of this book and signed up for it without realising that I have already read something by Sheena Wilkinson. I finished the book and when I was adding it to Goodreads I realised I read Name Upon Name by Sheena, which is actually related to this book! That book's main character is Helen, and she has a cousin Sandy, and in this book the main character Stella meets Helen in the first chapter, and she ends up living with Sandy! So that was delightful to learn and I'm glad I did learn it. 

So yes, Stella is fifteen and the year is 1918. The Spanish flu is endemic across Europe and the Great War is roaring. Stella has grown up in Manchester with her Mam after her mam had to leave Ireland when she was pregnant with Stella. Her mam has been a suffragette, fighting for women's rights to vote, and eventually, women who are over thirty and are householders are entitled to vote. It's a great victory! But Stella's Mam catches flu and Stella has to nurse her as she dies. 

Stella is left alone in the world and has to travel back to Ireland to live with her mother's sister Nancy. Nancy runs a kind of boarding house and Stella is to go and help her. She meets Helen on the train from Belfast; Helen is trying to visit Sandy but it doesn't go well. He is a wounded soldier, wounded in the trenches of the war, and has some kind of PTSD that means he rarely leaves his room. Also in the house are two elderly women and a young nurse, Kit, who nurses at the local convalescent home for soldiers.

Things are changing in Ireland - after the Easter Rising of 1916 the spirit of independence from British rule is in the air. Reading this as someone in 2026 who knows what happened in Ireland it was interesting to get into the head of someone living in Ireland at the time. Stella is an independent forthright young woman who wants to sort everything out. She has no malice in her and people's best interests at heart, but the way she goes about things sometimes rubs people up the wrong way! 

I loved the book, I am so glad I joined in this tour. I loved Stella and I liked the setting and her aunt and all the other inhabitants of the house. I liked Sandy and thought he was very compassionately portrayed. He is only 22 and has been an officer and has been permanently wounded by the war. I'm giving this four out of five and thoroughly enjoyed it.