The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt

The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


‘She had cried wolf and the wolf had come.’

July 1940, in the mist of the second world war, eleven year old Lydia, an escaped evacuee, she has returned to her home in a small village on the Suffolk coast. Searching for her family, young Lydia soon finds herself alone in a town that seems nothing like it once did. All the doors and windows are boarded up and there isn’t a soul to be found.
Finding her way home, Lydia soon realizes that her family are no where to be found and that she is rather alone, more so than she had thought. After searching the cottage fully, Lydia soon gathers a few things up and goes to the attic where she shuts and bolts the small door, essentially locking herself away before her mind starts to wonder over things, it doesn’t take long for Lydia to decide that she would return to Wales the next day.

When she wakes the next day, Lydia is suddenly aware of someone moving about the house downstairs, she listens and waits before moving to sit under the window, it’s not long before the attic hatch starts to rattle with the strangers attempt to enter.
As a young girl, all alone, Lydia fears and clamps her hand over her mouth to stay silent until the person’s footsteps returns to the lower parts of the house. It’s not long after that, that Lydia pick the courage up and starts to remove the ottoman covering the hatch and creep out and through the house.

This is where Lydia finds the man, sat in the darkness of the living room, she finds herself suddenly at the end of a pistol which is pointed straight at her before a light lights the room up.
Lydia lies and tells the man that her family would be home any moment, but the man seems to already know that they wont before he orders her to bed, a place Lydia quickly escapes too, afraid and shaking.

It’s the next day when she wakes to the man sitting in her room, his pistol in his hand still and just staring before he flies in to action, grabbing a suitcase and starts to pile her clothing in before dragging her to the door. He pauses and changes his mind, pulling poor Lydia back inside and in a instant Lydia is being held hostage inside her own home.
It quickly becomes clear that the man is a German, he tells her that more men are coming and that they need to prepare the house for them.

Over the next five days, Lydia and the German learn more about each other and it soon appears that the man knows a lot more about Lydia and her family than she first realized. With the German man a constant presence in the house, Lydia takes to watching him at all hours until his motives come true, he’s gathering the papers of Lydia’s father to use as a way of getting across the line.

The adventure to cross goes wrong and both the German and Lydia ends back up at the house, hiding away in the attic where Lydia finally gets to know how the German solider knows so much about her and her family.

The Dynamite Room is a novel which captures your attention and drags you deep within the pages, making you feel almost like you are there in the story yourself. It explores the relationship between a man and a child, a German and a British in a time where they were fighting a world war.
The book is filled with moments of tense and dramatic moments, causing the reader to keep turning the page.

The Dynamite Room is a novel which holds plenty of surprises and enough drama to keep the story from going dry, it’s the perfect novel for anyone who enjoys books set during the second world war.

A true 10/10 stars for the author, Jason Hewitt. The Dynamite Room is his first novel.


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