Book Review Club: The Alice Network by @KateQuinnAuthor #HistoricalFiction #thriller

Alice Network cover

The Alice Network
by Kate Quinn
Audiobook narrated by Saskia Maarleveld, 2017

This is a twin stranded storyline book. It begins in 1947 with a young American girl, Charlie Sinclair, traveling to France with her mother. They stop overnight in Southampton, England, where Charlie ditches her mother and heads for London to find the elusive Evelyn Gardner. Charlie is half French, and her cousin Rose disappeared during the war. Evelyn Gardner holds the only key to what might have happened to Rose, and Charlie is determined to find her. When she does, Eve threatens to kill her. Eve is an acerbic alcoholic with a stammer and deformed hands, having had every knuckle broken.

The other storyline follows Evelyn as she becomes a spy for England during World War I. Eve is half French also and speaks fluent French as well as German. After training, she is sent to France to join the Alice Network, a highly effective group of spies led by the remarkable Alice, who prefers to be called Lily. Eve lands a job working at a restaurant that caters to the German officer class called Le Lethe in Lille owned by a collaborator named Rene. He has no idea that the shy, stuttering girl speaks fluent German.

Later, during WWII, Rose worked for a man named Rene in a restaurant of the same name in Limoges. Could it be the same man?

Charlie, Eve and Eve’s Scottish man-of-all-work, Finn Kilgore, head for France to look for Rose and Rene. The three misfits form an alliance of need, but end up forging strong ties.

The story of Eve’s work with the Alice Network during the Great War is quite riveting. Saskia Maarleveld does a great job with all the different accents. I really did enjoy this book and recommend it highly. It’s exciting, with strong female protagonists, a sexy Scotsman, and a fascinating story.

Linda

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Book Review Club: The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel #ww2fiction #review

The Book of Lost Names cover

The Book of Lost Names
by Kristin Harmel
Gallery Books, Simon & Schuster, 2020

Set mostly in France, this is the story of Eva Traube, a French Jew of Polish descent. The book starts in 2005 with the elderly Eva, a librarian in Winter Park, FL. She sees a photo of a book she hasn’t seen for 40 years, a book looted by the Nazis during WWII. What makes the book notable is an intriguing puzzle inside the book, one that Eva put there during her days as a forger for the French resistance. She heads to Berlin to claim the book.

Then we go back to 1942 and most of the book is devoted to Eva’s flight from Paris and her relocation to a French village in the mountains not far from the Swiss border where she works as a forger for the Resistance and meets the love of her life, Remy. She also forges new papers with false identities for Jewish children who are being smuggled across the Swiss border. Bus she doesn’t want the children’s real names lost to history, so she and Remy figure out a way to record the names using a code in a very old religious book, one no one would pick up just to read.

I don’t want to say much more except I loved this book. Fascinating story line, exciting and very emotional. Recommended for fans of WWII fiction and women’s fiction.

Linda McLaughlin

As always, click on the link below for more great reviews in Barrie Summy’s Book Review Club!

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book review blogs
@Barrie Summy