Stirling and Quebec, 1900

A tale of blackmail, kidnap and terrible secrets. Of children being sent abroad, and of women trying to do the right thing at a time when they were second class citizens.

How far will Jane Knight and Eliza Frew go to protect the ones they love … and save themselves?

Child rescue and migration are the backdrops to this historical drama that packs a punch.

An intelligent and emotionally rich story which is truly engaging.

Highly commended in the Pitlochry Quaich Historical Novel competition.

My Review

It’s very interesting to read about the children who were sent abroad to ‘better their lives’ in another country. In this case it was Canada, but the reality is that they were separated from their families, and while many of them did end up happy and successful, many didn’t. It was still exploitation of children, many of them ridiculously young and vulnerable.

In The Rescue Sisters, we have three main characters. Eliza Frew has given up any idea of marriage and a family to rescue children that would otherwise have ended up in the poor house or on the streets. She has her reasons. The children are taken in, cleaned up, given beds, food and an education. But only the girls could remain after a certain age, the boys being sent to Canada to work mainly on farms. This is what happens to Winnie and her brother at the beginning of the book.

Jane Knight is the niece of Alice Knight, her father’s sister, and following a family tragedy, she goes to stay with Alice who takes her to meet Eliza. It is here she first encounters Winnie, who makes her promise to come back and see her. But it’s a few years until this happens, and Winnie feels that Jane owes her, and asks for a favour that would be beyond most young women’s capabilities in those days. And that is how we end up in Canada, where something happens on the journey that will test Jane to her limits.

I was fond of Jane, Eliza not so much. Her constant quoting from the Bible grated on me (my having been to a Convent school in the late sixties), but by far my favourite character is Alice Knight. Like Eliza, she never married or became a mother, but she is feisty, intelligent, fearless and a believer in women’s rights. She’s like the ‘unsinkable Molly Brown’ in Titanic. I can imagine Alice standing for Parliament as an MP, though we are still almost 20 years too soon for that to happen.

If I had one criticism, it would be that it is all a bit too neat at times. It could have been a lot more harrowing and gritty, but then I would probably be saying now that it was too harrowing and realistic, and that it left me in floods of tears! I can definitely see it as a TV series in the future.

Many thanks to @lovebookstours for inviting me to be part of #TheRescueSisters blog tour.

About the Author

Elaine Whiteford is a Scottish writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is passionate about local history and women’s social history in late Victorian and Edwardian times. The Rescue Sisters is the first of her historical novels to be published. She has had extracts of two novels published in Gold Dust magazine and short fiction published by Stryvling Press. In non-fiction Elaine is the author of The Story of Stirling Golf Club, a contributor to Wild & Temperate Seas and has had photo articles about scuba diving and marine life published in a wide range of magazines.

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