Beginning in 1926, The Convent Girl follows Maisie O’Sullivan from age four to her early forties. Brought up in a Catholic convent in Cobh, Ireland from two years old, Maisie has been told that both her parents are dead. Remembering no other life, she has adapted to the regulated life of the convent and, like the other boarders, knows and generally follow the routines. Both the nuns and the other girls are a mixture of personalities – there is kindness and playfulness as well as sternness and moments of cruelty. Maisie has her favourites among the nuns and her friends, as well as enemies – like school and the workplace there are always one or two mean girls.

Maisie is a cheerful, resourceful and at times mischievous girl with a gift for friendship who draws people to her. As she grows, she nurses a dream of having a family of her very own. When, at twelve, she is taken to Plymouth, she makes the most of her new straitened life, creating a family for herself from her new friends and neighbours.

The settings for the novel are described in striking detail. Maisie’s visit on her fourth birthday to the Bishop’s palace with its beautiful manicured gardens and St Coleman’s Cathedral with its spires and vaulting arches is shown from Maisie’s perspective and combined with her natural reactions to these new experiences. Her unwanted journey to England aboard the steamer Innisfallen and her later train journey are realistic and detailed – the crowded steerage, the poverty of some of her fellow travellers, the thick foetid air, the sounds and sensation of the steamer at sea, as well as the fleeting moments of kindness.

Most compelling are those sections of the novel set during the bombing of Plymouth during World War 2 – the ever-present anxiety and fear experienced by those living during this time and they ways they, like Maisie and those close to her, tried to live something like a normal life yet always prepared to deal with the worst. Reading the night bombing scenes is a gripping, heart-in-mouth experience and, although Maisie’s story is fiction, these scenes bring history truly to life. The novel shows the cost to those who survived this time with no one coming through unchanged in some way.

The Convent Girl is by turns both a heartwarming and a heartbreaking read and Maisie is a character who still continues to linger in this reader’s mind.

The Convent Girl is book 10 in Tania Crosse’s Devonshire series but each book is a stand-alone story.