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bethaniekay 's review for:
Dragonfly
by Leila Meacham
The premise of this novel was a bit more exciting than the story itself ended up being, IMO.
My first issue was that there were too many characters, names, nicknames, and code names. If you need a character list at the beginning of the book, that should tell you it's too much (and as a side note, reading on a Kindle meant that it was cumbersome to get back to that list when needed). My second issue was that for being people who were trained extensively to be spies, many of them seemed to abandon that training and act on their own selfish desires/needs very shortly after arriving in France. My third issue was that there was far too much detail and too many slow-moving plotlines for much of the book -- and then at the end, things went too fast and were skipped (i.e., there was almost no detail about how/why information about the whereabouts of the team members did or did not get to the appropriate people for all those years. Really?). My final issue is that I really just didn't care much about any of the main characters on the Dragonfly team. Maybe because there were so many characters, there wasn't enough dedication to developing any of them individually. Or maybe because they just weren't that interesting. I actually found myself caring more about some of the Nazi characters (which, IMO was one of the points behind the whole story -- that sometimes the people you think are 'bad' are actually 'good', or are doing 'good things').
I still did enjoy the story, as I do with many novels in the Historical Fiction / WWII genre, and I would probably still recommend this book to others. It just wasn't my favorite or anything truly spectacular.
My first issue was that there were too many characters, names, nicknames, and code names. If you need a character list at the beginning of the book, that should tell you it's too much (and as a side note, reading on a Kindle meant that it was cumbersome to get back to that list when needed). My second issue was that for being people who were trained extensively to be spies, many of them seemed to abandon that training and act on their own selfish desires/needs very shortly after arriving in France. My third issue was that there was far too much detail and too many slow-moving plotlines for much of the book -- and then at the end, things went too fast and were skipped (i.e., there was almost no detail about how/why information about the whereabouts of the team members did or did not get to the appropriate people for all those years. Really?). My final issue is that I really just didn't care much about any of the main characters on the Dragonfly team. Maybe because there were so many characters, there wasn't enough dedication to developing any of them individually. Or maybe because they just weren't that interesting. I actually found myself caring more about some of the Nazi characters (which, IMO was one of the points behind the whole story -- that sometimes the people you think are 'bad' are actually 'good', or are doing 'good things').
I still did enjoy the story, as I do with many novels in the Historical Fiction / WWII genre, and I would probably still recommend this book to others. It just wasn't my favorite or anything truly spectacular.