The Alice Network

In this book, we follow two timelines- one in 1915 during WWI and one in 1947, shortly after WWII. In the former timeline we follow Eve, a young girl with a stammer who is recruited to join The Alice Network, a network of female spies working against the Germans. In 1947 we follow Charlie St. Claire, a pregnant 19 year old American who comes to France looking for her cousin Rose who went missing during WWII. Charlie meets an older Eve and the two stories work in tandem.

This book was good. I appreciated the real life aspects of this book, and how Quinn took little bits of history and expanded them into full fledged characters and plots. Charlie, however, was a very unlikeable person to be in the headspace of and I didn't particularly think she was written well- she's good with numbers and sees everything in life as some sort of “equation” - solve for X. I'm sure people like this exist, but her thought process struck me as something someone would put in a book and not how an actual person would think constantly. Her love story is also fairly uninteresting, even for romances, and her relationship with Eve develops inorganically in my opinion.

Everything to do with Eve, though, was fantastic, both in 1915 and in the 1947 timeline. Eve was a great character and it's a shame she's fictional. This book did alert me to the real life Alice Dubois though, who ran the Alice Network and was a pretty heroic and relatively unknown figure from WWI. This book is worth reading for Eve and Alice (codename “Lili” for most of this book) alone.