January 23, 2018
“Facing a pistol-wielding murderer does tend to put parents further down the list of things to be intimidated by.”
The Alice Network, to put it plainly, is too long a book for one of its two perspectives to not work for me. Most of my three star ratings are "I liked it, but...", though in this case it's more that I liked roughly half of the book and had to force myself not to skim through the other chapters.
Many historical books use the perspectives of two characters more successfully than this one, in my opinion. The first that springs to mind is Orphan Train, a book that also uses two female characters to tell stories in two very different time periods. In this book, Eve's tale during World War I is so gripping and dangerous that the story noticeably slows down and becomes dull when we are forced to return to Charlie's perspective in 1947.
In 1915, Eve Gardiner is recruited as a spy in the Alice Network, based on the very real story of Alice Dubois who led an espionage team in Lille during the First World War. Eve is a fiery character who refuses to be held back by conventional gender roles and the speech impediment she has struggled with her whole life. Going undercover during the German occupation of north-east France, Eve must play a part and, at times, lie through her teeth.
Years later, embittered and drunk, Eve still has nightmares. Then the air-headed American socialite - Charlie St. Clair - walks into her life, demanding to know what happened to her cousin Rose during the Second World War. Eventually, the two women's stories begin to overlap, but there's a whole lot of Charlie's whining and self-pitying to sit through before that happens.
Eve's story is absolutely fascinating. Female secret agents sneaking around under the enemy's nose makes Charlie's road trip to find her cousin seem bland in comparison. One half of this book is a thrilling and terrifying historical adventure; the other half is a love story and an overlong journey across France.
It didn't help that Charlie herself was bratty, immature and selfish. I rolled my eyes so many times during her chapters. And when you consider that this is a 500+ page book, that makes approximately 250 pages that I was reading just to make it through to the good stuff.
The ending pulls the two stories together, but I think by then it was a little too late for me.
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