Mummy Darlings

This was a glorious edition in the Glorious Guinness Girls series, it had what I was looking for in this series and from this author. I really enjoyed getting to get back to this world. It had what I enjoyed from the previous book I read. It was what I was expecting and really worked in the world, it follows the description and I'm glad I was able to read this.

"Anyway, she supposed they had tried to tell, in their own ways. All those looks and pointed remarks. And she had ignored them. Just as she had ignored the intimacy of the way Philip and Violet spoke to one another. Until she couldn’t. Until the photograph—if she shut her eyes she could still see the two hands entwined in the gloom beneath the table—forced her to acknowledge what all those sideways comments and pointed jokes had meant."

If you enjoyed reading about the Guinness sisters in the 1920s, you will also enjoy reading about them adapting to this new decade (1930s) and their new grown-up lives. The three sisters-- Aileen, Maureen, and Oonagh-- are close, competitive, antagonizing, and conflicted as they adapt to married life and enter into motherhood. Each of them reacts differently to being a wife, being a mother, and learning that the world is much bigger than their small circle of rich friends. I enjoyed the historical aspects of this sequel as well as the characters that I got to know so well in "The Glorious Guinness Girls."

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this title.

"This stunning novel the from author of The Glorious Guinness Girls follows the three enigmatic Guinness sisters as they take on married life and motherhood at the beginning of the 1930s.

It's the dawn of the 1930s and the three privileged Guinness sisters, Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh, settle into becoming wives and mothers: Aileen in Luttrellstown Castle outside Dublin, Maureen in Clandeboye in Northern Ireland, and Oonagh in Rutland Place in London.

But while Britain becomes increasingly politically polarized, Aileen, Maureen and Oonagh discover conflict within their own marriages.

Oonagh's dream of romantic love is countered by her husband's lies; the intense nature of Maureen's marriage means passion, but also rows; while Aileen begins to discover that, for her, being married offers far less than she had expected.

Meanwhile, Kathleen, a housemaid from their childhood home in Glenmaroon, travels between the three sisters, helping, listening, watching - even as her own life brings her into conflict with the clash between fascism and communism.

As affairs are uncovered and secrets exposed, the three women begin to realize that their gilded upbringing could not have prepared them for the realities of married life, nor for the scandals that seem to follow them around."

If you've read all there is about the Mitfords, might I suggest the Guinnesses?