How to be Brave by Louise Beech

From Goodreads

All the stories died that morning … until we found the one we’d always known.

When nine-year-old Rose is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, Natalie must use her imagination to keep her daughter alive. They begin dreaming about and seeing a man in a brown suit who feels hauntingly familiar, a man who has something for them. Through the magic of storytelling, Natalie and Rose are transported to the Atlantic Ocean in 1943, to a lifeboat, where an ancestor survived for fifty days before being rescued. Poignant, beautifully written and tenderly told, How To Be Brave weaves together the contemporary story of a mother battling to save her child’s life with an extraordinary true account of bravery and a fight for survival in the Second World War. A simply unforgettable debut that celebrates the power of words, the redemptive energy of a mother’s love … and what it really means to be brave.

My thoughts

I bought this book back in June 2016 when it first came out, it's been sat on my Kindle ever since then.  I have no idea why it has taken me so long to get round to reading it.  Mind you it's not the only book that will have been waiting that long for me to get round to reading.

How to be Brave was the first book by Louise Beech, who also publishes in the name of Louise Swanson.  You could say Louise Swanson is her alter ego, someone in who she can escape from time to time.  Oh how to be able to do that.  

Louise wrote the book based on her experiences as the Mother of a Type 1 diabetic and the experiences that one of her relatives had been through during the Second World War.

I enjoyed this story and found that the way the two themes of the story were woven together were written well and kept the reader engaged with the story.  At times I felt like I wanted to take Rose in hand and show her how much she needed to come to terms with life as it was going to be for her from now on, it must be hard for them though when their lives are turned upside down with things like this.  I was really willing the men to survive their perils at sea ....