skygiants

jothra gave me Kate Quinn's novel The Alice Network as a holiday present under the correct assumption that it's highly relevant to my interests, by which I mean it's all about ALL-FEMALE SPY NETWORKS.

The A-timeline: in 1947, Charlie, an unmarried, pregnant American college girl, attempts to track down her missing cousin Rose, who vanished in occupied France. She ends up at the doorstep of Eve Gardiner, a traumatized alcoholic former spy, and the two of them plus Eve's chauffeur all go on a life-changing field trip across postwar Europe in the hopes of finding the missing cousin and also getting revenge on Eve's long-lost nemesis!

The B-timeline: In 1915, Eve works undercover in Lille with Actual Historical Spies Louise de Bettignies and Marie-Leonie van Houtte, and while Charlie's plotline is fine and all everything that happens in this part of the story is about three times as interesting, both because Eve is an interesting and competent character, and because Actual Historical Spy Louise de Bettignies is the best character in the book BY FAR.

By this point, if you've read Code Name Verity, inevitably comparisons will be invited, and I will tell you: even the best parts of this book are not anywhere near as good as Code Name Verity. But it does focus on women in espionage and women's experiences in wartime, and places all-important relationships between women front and center, and will scratch some of the itch. It's doing several things that I like and also some things that I don't like:

- the book is structured, as I said, around extremely intense and important relationships between women, but Charlie and Eve both have very pasted-on feeling heterosexual romances with Dashing Scottish Men ten years older than their teenaged selves (it's ~parallelism!~) and, like .... they're fine, I guess ... but why? Why.
- somewhat relatedly, it's definitely aiming to be a Feminist Book and leans into double standards and gendered trauma, but 'feminism' is about where it stops. Not much discussion of other angles of oppression, which feels like a fairly significant gap in a book set largely in 1947, in Europe, immediately after WWII. Nazi genocide is represented by the massacred French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, which, don't get me wrong, was a horrible thing and is worth writing about and remembering, and by a symbolic unnamed dead Gypsy (sic) girl in a concentration camp who died immediately after liberation and is important because Charlie's Dashing Scottish Love Interest has PTSD about it. Not a single appearance or reference to any character besides that one dead unnamed girl who was or might be targeted specifically because of their membership in a marginalized group, not a single reference to the targeting of marginalized groups other than the fact of the dead girl's ethnicity. And I absolutely do not think every book about WWII needs to be about the Holocaust, and certainly this book does not need to be about the Holocaust, but it is a little weird to read a book set in that time and place in which as far as I can remember the word "Jew" literally never appears.
- ( spoilers )

Anyway, all that said, I'm also very grateful to this book for introducing me to Louise de Bettignies, of whom I had vaguely heard but did not know much about; I am going to be tracking down biographies as soon as humanly possible