On Sept. 12, Emmy Award-nominated actress Millie Bobby Brown, best known for her role as Eleven on the Netflix series Stranger Things, released a book called “Nineteen Steps” inspired by her family history.
The story follows an 18-year-old girl Nellie Morris who lives in Bethnal Green, London, England in the middle of World War II. Almost every day, an air raid siren will go off, forcing everyone to go into shelter and pray they live another day. For Nellie, she focuses on her personal life as the mayor’s assistant, and spends time with her friends and family.
Just as Nellie gets used to the remnants of normalcy, a terrible tragedy occurs during an air raid, tearing her world apart. As the truth of the event starts to unfold itself, she learns that love and happiness can triumph over the odds of the incident.
From the start of the story, Brown hooked me in with a prologue where we see Nellie in 1993, in the Bethnal Green tube 50 years after the incident as she looks at the 19 steps she has to climb to get out of the tube. As I was reading, I felt the worry she had at that moment. I knew I had to turn the page.
Brown also played with emotion in the novel. One moment that spoke out to me was the love triangle between Nellie, her neighbor Billy and Ray, an American airman she encountered and immediately fell in love with. Billy loves Nellie but knows that he can’t get her because of Ray. While Ray sounded like a lovely human being, I was on Billy’s side the whole time because I sympathized with his feelings.
Another moment that stood out to me was the bond between Nellie and her little sister Flo, who is 7 years old. Brown described her as “the heart of the family” because of her light. Nellie and Flo would play games together and just laugh with each other which brought joy to the novel.
Compared to other World War II historical fiction books like “Code Name Verity” by Elizabeth E. Wein and “Among the Red Stars” by Gwen C. Katz, “Nineteen Steps” is told in the third person narrative and includes multiple character point of views.
One example of a multiple character point of view is when Brown described the incident. She used the love triangle, starting with Billy who heard the event first while on duty as an air raid warden. While battling asthma, he portrayed determination as he tried to save everyone in the incident.
Then, Brown showed Ray who was off duty that day. He was driving to see Nellie when saw a crowd of people running so he followed them to where the incident was and ended up in it. Luckily, he was saved and once he regained his strength he also tried to save as many people as he could.
Finishing off with Nellie, who was curious why her family wasn’t with her so she went to investigate. When she saw the incident, there was a mixture of horror and fear in her eyes. These feelings drew her to trying to find her family, worried that they were in the middle of it.
Overall, the character’s reactions as the scene unraveled tugged at my heart. I just wanted everyone caught up in the incident to be safe. All I can say is that this book is not a put down and I highly recommend it to any Millie Bobby Brown fan or a history buff.