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Elisaveta tells her story; she, her children and Arletta escaped into Turkey, across the Mediterranean to Tunis, then to Algiers, then Spain, then Portugal, then England, where the Princess did char work until she had earned enough to get her party to Plas Gwyn.
I agree that Elisaveta's story is improbable; there must have been some point at which she could secretly contact someone, or even go to a British Embassy - she does have British ancestry, after all, and they would hardly throw her out onto the street. But I do think she is shown as being very courageous - it's just her and Arletta and her very young children, and she just gets on with it with no dramatics. She's a very likeable schoolgirl and an admirable woman, one of my favourite characters. (The recitation of all the countries she passed through reminds me of the voiceover at the beginning of
Casablanca! Did she acquire some letters of transit?)
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What did stagger me was an Armada three-titles-in-one volume (Exile, At War, Highland Twins) priced at a modest £3,054.62
A writer friend once saw one of her books on sale online at some hugely inflated price. She queried it, because she had copies available to sell, so thought there was no justification for it. She was told that sometimes these prices aren't actually set by the seller, but are arrived at by the website - Amazon or whoever - using some algorithm which calculates the price based on how many people search for the book against how many come up for sale.
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one thing I do like about the book is the interaction among the juniors, with the various Bettany and La Rochelle members. They start out as very vivid characters, in spite of their young ages.
I think EBD is definitely planning for the future here. The girls who were at school in Tyrol will all have left in the next couple of years, so she needs a new cohort to carry the series forward.
I've got things to say about evacuees, too, but this is already quite a long post. Do people think it might be worth having a separate thread?