Children's & YA
July 2014
RUE END STREET
by Sue Reid Sexton
About this book: The sequel to Mavis’s Shoe, Rue End Street is a wartime novel about the Scots-Italians in World War II, separation, loss and being part of a family. It is September 1943, more than two years since Lenny’s world was devastated by the Clydebank Blitz and she and her family are safe in the beautiful green hut community of Carbeth, Scotland. But as the tides of war turn and Italy joins the Allies to fight the Nazis, the fists of war and fear are set to grab Lenny once more. Adversity threatens each moment, and Lenny is about to lose her closest ally. Told the family must move back to Clydebank with its smoke and factories and now overcrowded, teeming dwellings, Lenny refuses to give up her rural sanctuary. When her mother Peggy returns to Clydebank for a job, leaving Lenny to become a little mother to her siblings, Lenny lies about her age to look for work locally. But this new turn is bewildering. Exhausted, Lenny seizes on news of her father, convinced that if only she can discover the truth about where he is, if only she can find him, she can make their family complete again. But no-one will meet her eye. Desperate, and in need of a happy ending, Lenny sets out, but all is not as she hopes… Her steps take her the length of the great Clyde estuary, and into new dangers in the vast, dark, threatening and adult war-time ports of Helensburgh and Greenock... This book is the sequel to Mavis’s Shoe, a harrowing account of the bombing of Clydebank in March 1941.
