A review by macloo
Transcription by Kate Atkinson

4.0

This was highly entertaining, mainly because of the quirky personality of Juliet, the main character, a 20-something woman in 1940 who is recruited to work for MI5, the British spy agency. Primarily her work consists of listening to covert recordings of Nazi sympathizers and transcribing them, but on occasion she is called upon to do more than that. Seen mainly as a typist by the older men she works for, Juliet has received very little in the way of espionage training and is constantly trying to put together the puzzle pieces of the organization she's embedded in, assessing who works for whom and what it is they are actually up to. I liked the unusualness of the story, which sometimes switches to 1950, when the war (obviously) is over and Juliet is no longer officially employed by MI5 (although the question arises: do they ever really let go of you?). I didn't find the time-switching difficult at all (in some books, time jumps bug me a lot, but not here). I liked Juliet's obviously sharp intelligence, combined with a thick slice of naiveté (partly due to the time period: she's not worldly about sexuality, in particular) and founded on a high-end education, thanks to a scholarship, which resulted in knowledge of languages and more than a little Shakespeare. She's alone in the world, no parents or siblings, but she makes friends in her strange job and goes out after work and enjoys what London could offer young people in the time before the Blitz, and I also like how she related to other people and how she judged them and summed them up.

This is my second book by this author; I also enjoyed Life After Life.

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