My back loved this long book as I spent two days comfortably lying on my loveseat, giving it a rest as I made my way through this page-turner. Many books get five-star reviews, maybe deserving them or maybe not, but the truth is this one deserves a six or better. And by the end I was envisioning it as a movie – an exciting action movie.
So let me start out with the negatives – the length. As I read it, I tried to imagine what I might cut. I found quite a few things that weren’t essential to the story, but oh so good I’m glad they weren’t removed. Kate Quinn is an excellent storyteller. The other negative is more my own failing. I gave up on trying to understand the decoding process, but the real story was in the decoders, not the process.
The characters were a delight, and it’s always a pleasure to read love stories with men who are just like we women would like them to be. Of course, they weren’t all so ideal. I did giggle a bit, or maybe longed for the past, when at least one of the women was naïve about the process of sex, and the men didn’t demand it. It seemed like they reflected the time – WWII era – when our dates were expected to be gentlemen. Except when they weren’t. Speaking of gentlemen, I enjoyed spending so much time with the British upper class – the kind we read about in the news. A relief from the heavy reading I’ve been into lately. It seemed to me from what information I’ve picked up that she portrayed them accurately. Like all her characters, they were well drawn and real.
It was a pleasure to be reading about a period of time I personally shared, though not in a country being bombed and at the top level of society. Details like painting legs brown when silk stockings, or even stockings, weren’t available because of war shortages — and the description of clothes.
The author did a wonderful job of conveying the very special comradery of definitely-not- ordinary people working together in stressful secrecy to decode crucial documents – a job major to the war effort. And of the strain of sworn holding-the-work-close-to-the-vest.
Great character development, wonderful usage of real people in fictional ways, intriguing mystery, and just plain growing up and surviving in a world of terrible danger. Sadness, anger, grief, silliness, hope, love and sex. It’s all here in a mix that makes sense and draws the reader in to donate major time to taking it in.
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