jclare2 's review for:

A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II by Simon Parkin

3.0

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So, this read like it was trying really hard to be a novelistic (is that a word?) non-fiction book. Like, it was trying really hard to make characters and plot and cliffhangers a thing (if we called back to that little boy from the early boat sinking, who had nothing to do with the game making, one more time...). But... it was very much non-fiction. Which means: A) Like, a LOT of very detailed battle descriptions, which I find tremendously hard to follow. B) It couldn't take artistic license and flesh out the women. The author acknowledges that so little was recorded about or from these women, so you get a lot of names, references to what they did or who they married, and it was impossible to keep track of them because they felt like a list of names rather than people. They were not nearly as richly drawn as the men (and battles) are -- about whom far more was in the historical record and whose journals were carefully preserved. Of course.

So, it was a bit disappointing on the "ingenious young women" portion of the subtitle. However, I appreciated the underlying history of this story. And it completely begged the question: How have we not had an "Imitation Game" type movie of this WWII story, where a screenwriter and some British actresses could turn these women into real people?