Scan barcode
A review by junethebookworm
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
4.0
First, the good:
Eve's chapters are evocative and effective -- at their best, fast-paced and tense, as any good spy story should be. They are also quite grim; the personal toll endured by Eve and her fellow spies is bleak, bleak, bleak, and the tone of the book (at least in Eve's chapters) was darker than I anticipated. That said, I had never before heard of Lousie de Bettignies or the Alice Network, nor given much thought at all to the role of female spies during the World Wars, and for those reasons alone I think this book is a success in that it sheds light onto the extraordinary sacrifices that were made by those women. Eve is a compelling character, both fierce and formidable, and her journey from innocence to what you might call emotional ruin is intense and affecting. This novel makes clear that the horrors of war are not reserved for the battlefields alone, and the message that heroism can take many forms is an important one.
Now, the not-so-good:
I think that Charlie's chapters are almost entirely unnecessary, much weaker than Eve's, and that the book would have been much stronger and tighter without the dual perspective. As some other reviewers have said, I found myself hurrying through Charlie's comparatively dull chapters to get back to the real action with Eve. But it's the addition of Finn in particular that I take the most issue with; he is extraneous in the extreme and borders on being a tiresome trope -- the hunky, broody Scotsman with a dark past is classic romance novel fare, and he's not needed here. I might have been able to get on board with the inter-generational bond formed between Charlie and Eve if the Finn hadn't been included; I think this book had the potential to be a 5 star book without Charlie and Finn, and maybe could've even been a 4.5 star book if only Finn were subtracted.* As it is, they weigh the rest of the novel down and pad out the length of the book to a somewhat hefty 500 pages. (I think I really missed my calling as an editor, since I love to say what I think should've been cut out of a book...)
(*Speaking of subtraction, Charlie's repeated inner monologue likening events in her life to mathematical equations seems hokey from the very first instance to me, and quickly becomes tiresome.)
My verdict: uneven, but worth the read for the Eve sections. At least half of this novel is pretty great, and that's better than many books can claim.
Eve's chapters are evocative and effective -- at their best, fast-paced and tense, as any good spy story should be. They are also quite grim; the personal toll endured by Eve and her fellow spies is bleak, bleak, bleak, and the tone of the book (at least in Eve's chapters) was darker than I anticipated. That said, I had never before heard of Lousie de Bettignies or the Alice Network, nor given much thought at all to the role of female spies during the World Wars, and for those reasons alone I think this book is a success in that it sheds light onto the extraordinary sacrifices that were made by those women. Eve is a compelling character, both fierce and formidable, and her journey from innocence to what you might call emotional ruin is intense and affecting. This novel makes clear that the horrors of war are not reserved for the battlefields alone, and the message that heroism can take many forms is an important one.
Now, the not-so-good:
I think that Charlie's chapters are almost entirely unnecessary, much weaker than Eve's, and that the book would have been much stronger and tighter without the dual perspective. As some other reviewers have said, I found myself hurrying through Charlie's comparatively dull chapters to get back to the real action with Eve. But it's the addition of Finn in particular that I take the most issue with; he is extraneous in the extreme and borders on being a tiresome trope -- the hunky, broody Scotsman with a dark past is classic romance novel fare, and he's not needed here. I might have been able to get on board with the inter-generational bond formed between Charlie and Eve if the Finn hadn't been included; I think this book had the potential to be a 5 star book without Charlie and Finn, and maybe could've even been a 4.5 star book if only Finn were subtracted.* As it is, they weigh the rest of the novel down and pad out the length of the book to a somewhat hefty 500 pages. (I think I really missed my calling as an editor, since I love to say what I think should've been cut out of a book...)
(*Speaking of subtraction, Charlie's repeated inner monologue likening events in her life to mathematical equations seems hokey from the very first instance to me, and quickly becomes tiresome.)
My verdict: uneven, but worth the read for the Eve sections. At least half of this novel is pretty great, and that's better than many books can claim.