“Everything Will Be All Right” by Constance Emmett (Next Chapter, 312 pages, $11.99; also available as an eBook)
Constance Emmett of Hawley published her first book in 2019. “Heroine of Her Own Life” followed the hopes, dreams, and occupations of the Preston family of Belfast in Northern Ireland.
It centered on Meg, who was the same age as the 20th century and wanted to find love and meaningful work while maintaining ties with her large, sometimes conflicted family. It followed her from 2016 through the next couple of decades.
Emmett (I should stipulate that she is one of my neighbors) noted that the Prestons were based on her late mother’s family.
“Everything Will Be All Right” is a sequel to that book. It opens in 1941 as Belfast is being bombed regularly and viciously by the Luftwaffe. Meg and her partner Lillian Watson decide to move to the Causeway Coast, bringing with them portions of their families.
One of the family members who comes with them to their small home in the country is Meg’s 17-year-old nephew, Robert Henderson. Robert has just graduated prematurely from a school that closed because of the bombing. He is contemplating his future.
He adores his parents but finds their doting affections a bit stifling. He is also determined to demonstrate his manhood.
Like his aunt and an uncle, Robert is gay. His sexual orientation is not something he wants to admit, particularly to the parents who are not shy about their desire for their son to marry and produce babies.
To escape from these issues, he enlists in the British Navy. He finds life at sea miserable: wet, cold and dangerous, to boot.
Fortunately, he eventually manages to get away from the water, first temporarily on a visit to his aunt and cousin during shore leave in New York, and later more permanently when he is transferred to Bletchley Park.
Bletchley was an English estate that housed top-secret Allied code-breaking efforts during the war. Robert’s mathematical mind relishes the challenge of the work. He also enjoys getting to know two of his colleagues, young women named Jo and Holly.
The book follows Robert, Jo, Holly and the Preston family from the 1940s into the late 1960s, when Belfast suffered the “Troubles” as conflict over Irish identity broke out between Protestants and Catholics.
Robert and his partner, Albert, end the book determined to continue cherishing their families and to fight for the rights of people of all religions and all sexual orientations in Ireland.
As with “Heroine of Her Own Life,” I found the beginning of Emmett’s second novel a bit weak. She throws the reader into the book’s action rather quickly, and it’s hard to sort the characters out at first.
Once Robert joins the Navy, however, the book becomes clearer and much more appealing. As I read on, I came to care about him and the choices he made, as well as about the extended Preston family.
One of the themes of the book is that family ties must be maintained and nurtured. The book presents an appealing, expansive picture of family. In the end, Meg, Robert and their kin feel strong ties not just to blood relatives but to all those they love.
It ends up with most of the surviving Prestons at a family celebration in 1969, exploring what has changed and what has remained the same in their beloved Belfast … and thinking about the future.
Constance Emmett plans to deal with that future in the third book in her “Finding Their Way Home” series. I look forward to reading about the lives and loves of the next generation of this vibrant, caring family.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning author and singer. Her next book will be “Pot Luck: Random Acts of Cooking.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.