5 "a beguiling ode to love" stars !!

Thank you to the author, Netgalley and Random House Canada for an ecopy. I am providing an honest review. This was released September 2020.

This is a novel that slowly worked its way into my heart. We are introduced to a young trio of friends in 1950s Brighton who work in a seasonal variety show. Deftly, the author takes us into their developmental histories as we see the unfolding of a love triangle alongside camaraderie and good intentions. There is wizardry and wonder and a sense of sliding doors as love is not always noble but is forever welcome. Mr. Swift writes with elegance, wit and dare I say it magic...yes magic....tears were shed and a timelessness evoked....

A short novel with an emotional wallop. Bravo !

HERE WE ARE is set in 1959 in Brighton, England. Jack Robinson is the MC for the summer variety show. With the exception of his short stint in the army Jack has been performing most of his life.
A song and dance man Jack keeps his audience entertained however a new act has caught the audience’s attention. An illusionist by the name of Pablo and his assistant Eve have become the stars of the summer show. Off stage Pablo is Ronnie and Eve is Evie. The two are engaged and plan to be married after the show has closed for the season.
HERE WE ARE tells Jack’s, Ronnie’s and Evie’s stories. We learn about their past lives and how they came to be together for that significant summer in Brighton.
I thought HERE WE ARE was a beautifully written book focusing on interpersonal relationships. The characters were realistically portrayed. If you are a fan of character driven books I would strongly recommend this novel by Graham Swift.
I believe HERE WE ARE would make an excellent book club selection.
Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for providing an advance digital edition of HERE WE ARE.

Graham Swift's, Here We Are is a delightful and magical treasure. I wasn't sure quite what to expect from this brief and pithy novel, but found myself drawn into the lives of the three main characters quite easily.

This story is about Ronnie, Evie and Jack. Together they are The Great Pablo and his assistant Eve - a magical act, and Jack Robinson who is the M.C. and comedian of the trio's vaudeville act in the late 1950's. A perfect setting.

The story pivots from 1959 to the past, during WWII when Ronnie is sent to Evergrene, a home with a loving couple, Penny and Eric Lawrence to keep him safe during the war. There, Ronnie is not only taken by their estate, the fact that they have two bathrooms and even a car, but by the couple themselves, who love him in ways his own parents couldn't. It is here, at Evergrene that Ronnie becomes a sorcerer's apprentice and magic becomes an important part of his life.

We spend time with the trio as they perfect their act and create their own love triangle that will change things for everyone.

We also pivot forward to where the trio are, or might be. There are unanswered questions, grief and bereavement and pining for those magical moments of the past.

I loved how this book was written. It's emotional, without being overly so. Ronnie was my favourite and I felt that I got to know him on the deepest level with their still being an air of mystery surrounding him. The ending leaves us, like the characters, without all the answers and I believe that's how it should be.

A delightful read for a rainy Saturday morning in October.

Bookworm Rating: 🐛🐛🐛🐛

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Canada for a free e-copy of this book for an honest review.

I guess this one just wasn't for me. It is short so it should have been a quick read but it took me 3 weeks to read it and I had to force myself to read it. I just wasn't a fan and I was bored.

This review will be posted on my blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) on September 20. It will also be linked to Facebook and Twitter and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing.

This short novel is primarily set in three time periods. During World War II, eight-year-old Ronnie Deane is evacuated from his council house in Bethnal Green and sent to Evergrene, a manor house in Oxfordshire. In 1959, Ronnie has become Pablo, a magician and illusionist, who, with the help of his assistant and fiancée Evie White, has become the star of a variety show in the pier theatre in Brighton. His friend Jack Robbins is the master of ceremonies. In 2009, 75-year-old Evie, Jack’s widow of one year, looks back to the events of 1959.

Mystery pervades the book. Why did Evie end her engagement to Ronnie and marry Jack: “One day that September, after the show had finished and after the police had said she was free to leave Brighton, she . . . went to the end of the pier, took off the [engagement] ring and threw it in the sea”? What happened to Ronnie who, after the summer of 1959, “never appeared again at all”? Did Evie every really know Ronnie? Did Jack? And there’s also the question of whether Evie regrets her choice.

The title refers to a phrase often used when offering something or announcing someone on stage; it is inevitably stated in an upbeat tone suggesting happiness. Of course, the happiness is often an illusion. Evie, for instance, is taught by her mother: “’And you must keep smiling, never forget your smile.’” And she remembers that lesson, keeping an “indomitable and gleaming smile” so that it becomes a part of her: “The last thing she would put on was her smile, though did she really need to? Wasn’t it just a part of her, like her flashing blue eyes?” A cake celebrating a performer’s 50 years on stage has “the two famous masks, but not in this case of comedy and tragedy – both masks must be smiling.”

This book reminded me of lines in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts (II,vii, 139-142).
The book examines how people assume different identities throughout life. Of course, there are the stage names so Ronnie Deane becomes Pablo and then The Great Pablo; Evie White becomes Eve; and Jack Robbins becomes Jack Robinson and then Terry Treadwell. Different roles are assumed: Jack begins life as a “song-and-dance man” but then becomes a film star and a Shakespearean actor. Evie, the glamorous magician’s assistant, morphs into a serious businesswoman who “found the all-important key in the small of [Jack’s] back and learnt how, carefully, lovingly, to turn it, when all the [other women] were too busy just wrapping their legs around him.” Even as a child, Ronnie becomes two different people: he goes from being the son of a charwoman and a seaman to being the surrogate child of a couple living in a country manor, a transformation so complete that he is alienated from his mother. When he performs his first magic, “He himself had become a different person.”

The point seems to be that our lives are little more than “a flickering summer concoction at the end of a pier.” Who is the real person behind the roles we adopt? For example, Evie imagines her prospective mother-in-law asking, “And who’s she, anyway, when she’s at home, the one with all the sequins and feathers and precious little else, looking like she’ll never stop smiling?” We act, we give our audience what they want, a lesson Ronnie teaches Evie: “’You have to give the public what they want and expect” while diverting their attention from what you don’t want them to see. In her skimpy costume, Evie’s job as assistant is to divert the audience’s attention from Ronnie. On the anniversary of Jack’s death, Evie has a good cry and then gets ready to have dinner with a friend: “she’d got up again, not a sobbing child but a seventy-five-year-old woman, and prepared herself slowly . . . She’d put on her face. The cream blouse, the straight black skirt, the little black jacket, the pearls.” One persona disappears and another emerges. Evie thinks, “The batty old woman in the garden and the bawling infant had turned into a princess sitting in a Mayfair restaurant, and now she was going to have to play her part.” At the end, she wonders who would dare say “She couldn’t act,” because she feels “she had performed her best.”

This novel seems deceptively simple and straight-forward but it has complexity, leaving the reader thinking about the illusive nature of identities and life itself. Illusions are not found only on the stage. But I do not think that it’s an illusion that the author has created some magic in this finely crafted novel.

Note: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. The book will be released on September 22.

Here We Are is rather short and sweet, filled with many vivid settings from different, transitional, time periods. Graham Swift writes lovely and interesting sentences, but while I thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience, it didn't add up to very much. Still happy to have read it.

Here We Are is set (primarily) in three time periods: Just before and during WWII (from the POV of Ronnie Deane, an eight-year-old boy evacuated to a country manse from his modest London home); 2008, from the POV of aged former showgirl, Evie White; and the summer of 1959 on the Brighton Pier, when Ronnie and Evie paired up as a magician and his assistant, to appear in a variety show hosted by charming song-and-dance man, Jack Robbins. Each timeline demonstrates how people transition into new selves, conflating identity with illusion – performers assuming stage names, an actor being called by his most famous TV character's name on the street, a playboy's girlfriends collectively called “Flora” because no one could be bothered to remember their actual names, a married woman wanting to keep her maiden name but forever called by her husband's – and the idea of “illusion” is made manifest by the magic taught to Ronnie by his foster father in the country (a familial situation that each side wishes could be made permanent, even if it's never discussed).

Rabbits and romance, parrots and rainbows, air raids and sequins: Swift paints beautiful word pictures that certainly capture a variety of times and place, but they feel more like nice little scenes than a complete novel.

This was well written but the story really did not captivate me. It was a short book and I finished it in a couple of hours.

I really liked Ronnie and his host parents during the war but the other characters were sorely lacking and I found it hard to sympathize with an older Evie at the end of the book. The ending left me with more questions than answers.

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada, the author and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.