Rating: 5 Stars
The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff is the fictional tale of women who were recruited and trained to become spies in Europe during WWII. It is a tale of incredible courage and fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds. Though the tale is fictional it is based on the fact that there were women that were spies during WWII.
This story starts in the U.S. shortly after the war is over. Grace Healey, a war widow herself, finds a suitcase in Grand Central station in New York City. She can’t resist the urge to open it and look through its contents. She finds a group of pictures of young women and this intrigues her. On a whim she takes the pictures and returns the suitcase to its hiding spot under a bench.
She becomes obsessed with finding out who the suitcase belonged to and who the women are in the pictures. As she works to gather information, the reader is introduced to Eleanor Trigg. Eleanor runs the organization in England that recruits, trains and handles women spies in German occupied Europe. Eleanor recruits a young single mother Marie Roux who is later sent to France as a radio operator for the French resistance. As Grace slows finds all the puzzle pieces and fits them together we see what really happened to these women.
My favorite thing about this book is the strong, resourceful, women characters the author has presented us. We normally think of women during WWII as entering the work force for the first time and doing men’s jobs in factories that would normally have been considered male only job. We tend to forget that women did play vital roles during WWII.
The story is told from three POVs, Grace, Eleanor and Marie. The author made sure the plot was seamless despite the changing POVs throughout. There was not tons of character development but there was enough to fit the plot. At first I thought this might be a flaw, but I in retrospect I think the author did this so on purpose. She gave us enough to connect to the characters but not enough to overwhelm the reader and bog down the plot.
The pace of the plot was good and there was plenty of intrigue to keep the reader turning the pages. I was hooked early on in the story and I wanted to see what actually happened. I also liked how everything wrapped up at the end. I wish I could elaborate further; yet, I don’t want to spoil the story for others. Let me just say that how the government handled things was spot on to what happens in real life.
I know from other books that the life expediency of a spy during WWII was very short. Therefore, the only thing I disliked about the story was the decisions made by Marie. I felt she was overly reckless and even a little naïve. Who would go off and become a spy knowing the odds of dying are very high and thus leaving a young child without a mother.
I highly recommend this book for readers of both Historical Fiction and WWII stories. I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.