A Sunlit Weapon is the seventeenth book in the Maisie Dobbs series and I don’t recommend it as a standalone. Several events from past novels in the series are referred to, meaning this book contains spoilers for those works and this one also relies heavily on the reader’s knowledge of occurrences/characters in previous instalments. October…
Lorraine Heath joins the women’s fiction market in this World War II-set tale about daring women who used their biplanes to battle the evils of Hitler. The volume reminds me of the work of Jill Barnett, whose book about women fighters in World War II – Sentimental Journey – also explores the romantic exploits of…
The Lost Son is a very straightforward women’s fiction novel centering around – you guessed it – a woman’s quest to find her missing child. Julia Kruse’s mother died in childbirth. Her father, a famous chef at a luxury hotel, fears his demanding job will keep him from spending time with his two young daughters,…
With apologies to Paul Simon, it seems there are 50 million ways to rewrite Little Women. I’ve seen modern adaptions that switch the book’s setting and time period; versions that give us a living Beth or a Jo/Laurie union. Versions where the Marches are vampires or werewolves, or just plain horny. The four folks taking…
As the Nazis march toward Paris in 1940, American ballerina Lucie Girard buys her favorite English-language bookstore to allow the Jewish owners to escape. Lucie struggles to run Green Leaf Books due to oppressive German laws and harsh conditions, but she finds a way to aid the resistance by passing secret messages between the pages…
Death at Greenway is described as a “captivating suspense novel about nurses during World War II”. Oddly enough it merits neither descriptor. Bridget Kelly has made a deadly mistake – or so her supervisor has informed her. As a trainee, Bridget is to walk the wards with an actual nurse and offer assistance, not perform…
The worldwide fascination inspired by the six Mitford sisters continues apace, as might that inspired by any family which managed to spawn an ardent communist activist journalist whose investigation of the funeral industry made history, an anti-communist internationally famous novelist, two Hitler-loving fascists (one quite literally so), a country girl, and the Duchess of Devonshire…
Sisters in Arms follows the lives and loves of two fictional characters in the Six Triple Eight, the real all-Black battalion of the Women’s Army Corps during WWII. Telling the story of our heroines from when they first receive the letters inviting them to join the unit until war’s end, this tale reveals all the…
In 1975 a movie was made of the popular biography The Hiding Place. Covering the horrific events of the Nazi’s occupation of the Netherlands, the narrative tells what happened to Corrie ten Boom and her family as members of the Dutch resistance. Chasing Shadows is a fictionalized account based on other stories of WWII resistance…
The Curator’s Daughter is a story of how women often find themselves in the most impossible situations and manage to rise above them to create a better world for themselves, those they love and all who come after them. Hanna Tillich is not a Nazi, but she is reluctantly employed by them. She worked all…