Coronation Year: A Novel

I fell in love with the protagonist trio, the sort of people who are “brave enough to speak loudly of what happened…Words aren’t the only way to answer the world’s questions.” As a fan of Jennifer Robson’s previous novel Our Darkest Night, I was delighted by Stella’s return appearance alongside Edie and Jamie as they steward their suffering to help others through hospitality, painting, and photography. When a greedy and disgruntled distant cousin threatens the queen’s procession, “Edie, Jamie, and Stella had saved Coronation Day from certain disaster.” While Coronation Day is a historical fiction novel, one element is grounded in the reality of racism and abuse. Jamie’s character draws upon the memoirs and oral histories of British citizens of Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan ancestry and serves as a reminder to keep the bigots at bay! The duo that stole my heart (and reminded me of my own counterpart!), however, were the Crane sisters, “although I think of them as the Hons…Officially, they are the Honorable Leopoldine Crane and the Honorable Albertine Crane, though they’ve given us leave to call them Miss Polly and Miss Bertie…They’re rather eccentric, but they’re also quite sweet…Never mind that they can’t help but be rather difficult. They had an old-fashioned upbringing, you see.” The brief introduction to Her Majesty “left the sisters in a state of almost incandescent happiness.” The Hons are who I aspire to be and the Blue Lion is the haven I aspire to make my home when my sister and I are old and senile! Like “the siren call of freshly baked scones” served at high tea at Edie’s Blue Lion, Jennifer Robson's Coronation Year tastes “of butter and sugar and comfort.” Just as the artists whose paintings Stella admires, “when she fell into their vanished worlds, one canvas after another, each of them entirely unburdened by the future,” literary masterpieces, too, have the power to lift a little of our sorrow from our shoulders. Coronation Year deserves a crown!