The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

December 5, 2016
In 1940, at a time when women’s roles were still firmly rooted in home and hearth, the ladies of Chilbury, England, find themselves at the bleeding edge of progress as the ramifications of World War II begin to infiltrate their little town. The men of Chilbury head to battlefields, and the village choir becomes the first casualty of the war. When a female professor of music insists the choir can be reassembled as a ladies’ choir, the small community is at first scandalized by such an idea. But this is soon lost to other more salacious events. There is the brigadier who hires an unscrupulous midwife to swap his baby girl for a boy, and his teenage daughter seduces a handsome artist who’s come to town under mysterious circumstances. An upstanding single woman (a widow whose only son has gone to fight) is tapped to take a colonel into her home, and a 10-year-old Czech evacuee finds out what happened to her family. As the war advances on Chilbury, even more lives are changed when a German bomb kills a young mother as well as the choir mistress, young men are sent off to war, and spies and black market profiteers lurk in the quiet lanes. Told in the form of diaries and letters in the voices of the female characters, Ryan’s novel, reminiscent of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, captures the experience of the war from a woman’s perspective. Readers may have come across this kind of story before, but the letter/diary format works well and the plot elements satisfyingly come together.

This charming debut introduces the villagers of Chilbury, England, who defy tradition--and the vicar--as they keep calm and carry on during WWII. Specifically, they resurrect the church's choir in spite of the absence of male voices. The journal and letter format of the story poses a challenge to transform into audio, and this superb cast fully succeeds in keeping listeners engaged with voices that embody the personalities of all the characters, especially the five choir members. The timid widow who finds her voice, the boy-crazy daughter of the local gentry, the precocious sister, the young Jewish refugee, and, for comic relief, the scheming midwife hoping to outrun her shady past all show, in their own unique ways, the resilience on the home front. N.E.M. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine