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Title: Home Fires

Subtitle: The Story of the Women's Institute in the Second World War

Author: Julie Summers

Narrator: Juliet Mills

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-15-15

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 54 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Soon to be a PBS Masterpiece series starring Samantha Bond (Downton Abbey) and Francesca Annis (Cranford)

Away from the frontlines of World War II, in towns and villages across Great Britain, ordinary women were playing a vital role in their country's war effort. As members of the Women's Institute, an organization with a presence in a third of Britain's villages, they ran canteens and knitted garments for troops, collected tons of rosehips and other herbs to replace medicines that couldn't be imported, and advised the government on issues ranging from evacuee housing to children's health to postwar reconstruction. But they are best known for making jam: From produce they grew on every available scrap of land, they produced 12 million pounds of jam and preserves to feed a hungry nation.

Home Fires, Julie Summers' fascinating social history of the Women's Institute during the war (when its members included the future Queen Elizabeth II along with her mother and grandmother), provides the remarkable and inspiring true story behind the upcoming PBS Masterpiece series that will be sure to delight fans of Call the Midwife and Foyle's War. Through archival material and interviews with current and former Women's Institute members, Home Fires gives us an intimate look at life on the home front during World War II.

Members Reviews:

Tread Carefully & Be Amazed

Ok let's cover the basics. This book--Home Fires (aka Jambusters in the UK) is not a novel, not the story from the PBS series and has nothing to do with the actresses on the photo of the dust jacket. Everyone seems a bit mixed up about this book. Home Fires--the PBS TV program--is a fictionalized account of WWII and the Women's Institute drawn from this nonfiction book.

This book is a very serious, crunch the numbers, fact dense look at what life was really like in Britain. I can't say or agree that the book just focuses on the WWII years. In reality, we get so much information that looks both back to the WWI years and forward to the UK still rationing and struggling in the 1950s. The scope is much broader than I had expected and offers a picture I had not experienced until now.

At once fascinating and at the same time almost repellant in its detail of day to day, down and dirty, war time home-front survival, farming, butchering of animals and vermin control. It is a book that I dreaded listening to--but at the same time couldn't stop thinking about and talking about.

It is a cautionary tale and a story of strong, can-do women who accomplished the impossible. The TV program does not begin to do justice to the actual scope and numbers presented in the reading. The whole thing was mind boggling and gave new meaning to the idea of preparedness and self-reliance for me.

Best to go into this book understanding that while the journal entries add a human face to the bare knuckle facts--there is zero fluff and cozy to be found. I finally understand the expression that would fix itself to my great aunt's face--a survivor of WWII London--when people would romanticize the war years. It all makes sense now.