“Kate’s War,” by Anacortes, Washington, author Linda Stewart Henley, is about a young woman whose singing ambitions are challenged by the onset of World War II.

Anacortes, Washington, based author Linda Stewart Henley returns to England, the land of her birth, for her latest novel, “Kate’s War.”

Not only that, she sets this story in Carshalton, a town just south of London where she attended school as a girl, so her place descriptions are deeply authentic.

To top it off, she wraps the story around a real-life incident that transpired just off the coast of Northern Ireland during World War II. It was an event her dad experienced firsthand as a young man, but it wasn’t until he died years later that Henley discovered his unpublished memoir about the harrowing incident.

All that said, this fictional story centers not on that incident, but on the life and aspirations of 20-year-old Kate Murphy.

This week’s book

“Kate’s War” by Linda Stewart Henley

She Writes Press — 284 pp — $17.95

Kate dreams of moving out of the family home in Carshalton to share a flat in London with her friend. She’d like to put distance between herself, her fussing mother and some of the disappointments of her young life.

By this age, she’s already experienced a romance gone wrong, as well as a setback in her hoped-for career as a singer. Only recently, the onset of any anxiety seems to provoke Kate into hiccupping fits — making it impossible for her to get further musical training, or to perform before an audience. She hopes that in London she can find a doctor who can cure her of hiccups the way the king was able to overcome his stutter.

But her plans come to an abrupt halt when a radio broadcast announces that England has gone to war against Germany.

Kate realizes this isn’t the best time to assert her independence. Reluctantly, she keeps to her part-time job of teaching music at the local Catholic school. And she still has to put up with her mother’s fretting.

But even though she feels stuck in a rut, changes come along.

Wartime preparations call for everyone to make sacrifices. Her best friend gets called away to work on a project she can’t talk about. Her little brother is sent off with other schoolmates his age to live with families in the countryside, where there’s less danger of being bombed by the German Luftwaffe.

A new suitor proves to be a good dancer but doesn’t set Kate’s heart aflutter.

And the parents of one of her students make a request that will prove to be challenging to deliver.

Despite all of the dramatic elements that Henley incorporates into the plot, the storytelling sometimes feels sluggish. There’s a heavy reliance on dialogue, without always giving the characters enough interesting things to say.

Kate is slow to accept agency in her own life, but as she does, the second half of the book gradually picks up the pace.

“Kate’s War” touches on some of the interesting choices Britain made early in World War II. But for her next book, perhaps Henley could be encouraged to polish up and publish her dad’s eyewitness account of those times.