Lingard makes setting crucial to her plots, and in The File of Fraulein Berg, Northern Ireland, with its political and religious conflicts, spurs the girls' restlessness. The story begins in 1944, after the bombings and "excitement" have dwindled in Belfast, and the girls' boredom typifies the drab, dreary life of many young people in the city. Everyone seems to be trapped in a dismal world, waiting for the fighting to end. Growing up as a child in Northern Ireland, Lingard experienced this life herself, and her descriptions of Kate and her friends reveal that she knows firsthand just how deeply Irish children of the war were affected by their social situation.

As in her other books, Lingard's characters are molded by their environment, and Kate, Sally, and Harriet cannot help but be molded by theirs; Lingard makes clear that the melancholy that existed in that place and time permeated...