A Daughter's Tale

April 2, 2012
Churchill’s youngest daughter (born in 1922) reflects on fond memories of the famous British prime minister and on her own role in a heavy antiaircraft battery unit during WWII. Soames (Clementine Churchill) remembers her doting father and socially distracted mother as she grew from much wanted baby into early adulthood, culminating in her wedding after previous short-lived engagements. Thanks to her personal diaries and unpublished letters, Soames recreates with specificity some amusing scenes, casually dropping names like Charlie Chaplin and Lawrence of Arabia, and also commenting on the great man who, while building his power structure in government, was unable to house-train the family’s beloved dog. Although occasionally overladen with daily monotony, Soames’s memoir presents a unique perspective on wartime Britain and her own desire to protect her precious Papa from political and personal attacks while strengthening her own character. 32 pages of photos. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.).

June 15, 2012
Memoir of the youngest child of Winston Churchill, focused largely on the years encompassing World War II. Countless books have been written about Churchill, and even this memoir is only the latest book that Soames (Clementine Churchill, 2002, etc.) has written or edited about her family's history. As the baby of the family, born in 1922, she is Churchill's only surviving child, and she delivers a rare eyewitness account of her father. However, readers looking for an emotionally engaging look at the Churchill family's private lives will be disappointed. Soames clearly worshipped her father, but she appears not to have known him on a deep emotional level. Indeed, other than a few airy letters, the author shares relatively little direct communication between them. She draws heavily on journals and letters she wrote during her young womanhood, in which she apparently had a habit of recounting the menus of lunches and dinners in great detail. Though famous figures make appearances, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, T.E. Lawrence and Charlie Chaplin, Soames rarely judges anyone as less than utterly charming, nor does she provide particularly useful information about historical events. The memoir becomes marginally more interesting in later chapters, as when Soames recounts her stint serving with the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war, and especially when she briefly tells of her visit to the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. However, Soames rarely delves much below the surface of things, keeping events (and emotions) strictly at arm's length--which often makes for dreary reading. A lackluster memoir, of interest only to the most devoted Churchill aficionados.

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May 15, 2012

Winston Churchill's reputation as the indomitable prime minister who led Britain through World War II precedes him. Soames (Clementine Churchill: The Biography of a Marriage) is the youngest of Winston and Clementine Churchill's children (and the only one still living), and her recollections, supported by her journals, reveal a loving father whose triumphs and frustrations were regularly shared at the dinner table. She also tells the story of her own coming of age as an adolescent living through the London Blitz, desperate for normalcy in her debutante year. By 1943, two years before war's end, a more mature Mary had become her father's aide-de-camp, accompanying him to North America for the Quebec Conference, which resulted in the Allied invasion of France, the beginning of the end of the war. This memoir is a loving tribute to a famous father and a tale of the daughter who chose to be at his side. VERDICT Soames's use of her own journals in filling out her memories results in a perspective on both herself and her father that few could match. Recommended for both memoir and popular Winston Churchill biography collections.--Lisa Guidarini, Algonquin Area P.L. Dist., IL

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2012
Soames, Winston Churchill's youngest child, filters some of the greatest events and most remarkable leaders of the twentieth century through her own personal lens in this detailed memoir of her early childhood at Chartwell and her wartime experiences in London and beyond. Buoyed by numerous diary entries and excerpts from letters, her memories, even after such a long period of time, ring clear and true. After a privileged, though not overly pampered, childhood, she, like so many of her generational peers, was abruptly thrust into adulthood by her nation's entry into WWII. Enlisting in the ATS (Auxillary Territorial Service), she served as a gunner girl and accompanied her father as aide-de-camp to both the Quebec Conference (1944) and the Postdam Conference (1945). What really distinguishes her recollections is the fact that she so often straddled two worlds, moving between two distinct social and occupational circles. Soames gratefully and graciously shares her box seat at the crossroads of history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)