Orphan Monster Spy by Matt Killeen

Orphan Master Spy starts out with a bang. 15-year-old Sarah emerges from the floor of her mother's car to find that her mother has been shot dead at a checkpoint in Germany. Will the Nazis know to look for a child? She's not sticking around to find out.

It's 1939 and Sarah is an orphan, half-Jewish, and on the run. But, Sarah has a few marks in her favor. She is physically adept (a former gymnast), smart as a whip, and blonde with blue eyes. She's small for her age, which means she can get away with pretending she's as young as 11 or 12. And, her Aryan features mean she can hide in plain sight if she can find a way to obtain false papers. After a night sleeping on a roof to evade the Nazis, she finds a friend. But, his life is in danger, as well.

When Sarah offers to help out with an important mission, it means going where the worst of her enemies live, inside a Nazi girls' boarding school where she is tasked with befriending the daughter of a scientist who has created a devastating bomb the size of a grapefruit. Can Sarah survive school and befriend Elsa in time to save the world from this bomb? Sarah finds the task is even more challenging than she'd imagined. She's is naturally a bit caustic and her sharp intellect can get her in trouble. Making friends is not easy. She's already a fish out of water and there's a social hierarchy at the boarding school. The only way to befriend Elsa is for Sarah to make her way to the top tier.

Highly recommended - Smart, scary, tense and gripping - a terrific read with the kind of disturbing, violent moments that are typical of realistic WWII novels. Sarah is fierce but flawed, a tough and witty character whom you can really get behind; and, the English captain she befriends has clearly also lived through a lot. I liked hanging out with them in the first part of the book. But, then comes the really scary part.

Life at a Nazi boarding school is insane. I can admit I found the boarding school parts much more uncomfortable to read, although Sarah is befriended by another girl who doesn't quite fit in (so, at least she always has one friend to rely on) and there are plenty of action scenes. The hardest part is the bullying and some vicious scenes of violent abuse. The girls are rough on each other, with an initiation for the new students and competition to get into the favored group. Will Sarah succeed at befriending Elsa? Will she get caught out as a spy? Will she survive the brutality of the girls she lives with and their teachers? Orphan Monster Spy had a slight sagging middle problem but the phenomenal ending is worth sticking it out. I never even remotely considered setting the book aside. Sarah's a terrific character and I cared about her. The reward for sticking out the slower part is immense.

The ending hints at continuation of Sarah's story, so I wrote to the publicist to ask if Orphan Monster Spy is a series book and she confirmed that it is, indeed, the first in a series. It's wrapped up completely and could stand on its own, though: no cliffhanger ending. I'm grateful to the author for that (I abhor cliffhangers). I'll be looking forward to reading more of Sarah's adventures.


©2018 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Spies in the Family by Eva Dillon

Spies in the Family: An American Spymaster, His Russian Crown Jewel, and the Friendship that Helped End the Cold War is part memoir, part spy story about a CIA operative, Paul Dillon, and a Russian spy he handled. That spy, Dmitri Polyakov, was possibly the most important GRU agent ever "turned" by the CIA and the author is the daughter of the CIA operative who worked with him. Eva Dillon weaves her personal story in with the information she learned through personal interviews and extensive reading. But, the focus of the book is on the relationship mentioned in the subtitle: the people the two spies interacted with, the methods of their spycraft, the occasional betrayals and deaths of various spies, and what became of Paul Dillon and Dmitri Polyakov.

I was impressed with the readability of this particular work of nonfiction. Books about intelligence operations can be surprisingly dry or convoluted, but I never had any trouble at all discerning the relationships, remembering the real-life characters and distinguishing them from each other, following the use of various spying tools and methods, etc. In fact, the Cold War is a time period I tend to avoid because the little I've read has been too dry for me.

Not Spies in the Family. The story was told well and felt complete but left me wanting to read more about the Cold War era, particularly espionage memoirs of a similar nature. There's an extensive list of references in the back of the book and I may need to scratch down a few titles before I send my ARC on to Eldest (who is besotted with the Cold War era in the way I am with WWII). Kiddo has been begging me to read a biography of CIA Director William Casey that he loved, as well, and while I've been lukewarm about the subject matter and brushed him off for several years, I've moved the book to my bedroom TBR. My interest in Cold War spying has definitely been piqued.

Highly recommended - A well-written, easily digestible story of two spies, their families, the agencies in which they worked, and the methods they used. Really enjoyed this read and found it was easy to keep all the characters straight. I particularly found the communication methods and tools fascinating. And, I enjoyed reading about what it was like being the daughter of a spy, moving from post to post, while not aware of what her father's job entailed. I gave Spies in the Family 5 stars at Goodreads.


©2018 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Wonder Women by Sam Maggs

[Emma Edmonds] knew she deserved a military pension, but she also knew it would be difficult to convince the government she truly had fought in the war (even though it's probable that nearly four hundred women were active in the Civil War). So she did the most dramatic thing possible: at a reunion of her Michigan Infantry division, she showed up in full skirts and was like, "Hey guys, it's me, Franklin!" Everyone was utterly confused until her colonel admitted, "I recall many things which ought to have betrayed her, except that no one thought of finding a woman in a soldier's dress."

~ fr. p. 112 of Wonder Women, Advance Reader Copy (some changes may have been made to the final print version)


Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History by Sam Maggs is packed full of mini biographies of women for whom the term "kick-ass" is maybe a little mild. Going back as far as hundreds of years, author Sam Maggs tells stories of women with amazing skills and talents who refused to hide their abilities or let them die away for the sake of the menfolk.

Told in a breezy, modern style, Wonder Women describes the challenges each of these amazing women faced and how and why most of these historical powerhouses have fallen into obscurity. The short reason: men like taking credit, if not outright stealing, the work of people they consider inferior.

Each small chapter opens with an illustration and a quotation. The opening chapter, for example, describes Wang Zhenyi, a Chinese astronomer, mathematician, and poet who was active in the 18th century. Her quote:

"It's made to believe Women are same as Men; are you not convinced Daughters can also be heroic?"

The contents are divided into the following sections:

• Women of Science
• Women of Medicine
• Women of Espionage
• Women of Innovation
• Women of Adventure

At the end of each of these sections is a Q & A with a living woman who has experienced or is currently working in a male-dominated field:

• Dr. Lynn Conway - Computer Scientist, Electrical Engineer, and Science Educator
• Dr. Buddhini Samarasinghe - Molecular Biologist, Cancer Researcher and Founder of STEM Women
• Lindsay Moran - Author, Journalist, and Former CIA Operative (I reviewed her book: Blowing My Cover)
• Erica Baker - Engineer
• Mika McKinnon - Field Geophysicist, Disaster Researcher, and Science Writer

Highly recommended - Wonder Women is the kind of book that ought to be required reading for both sexes -- girls, so they know they can do whatever they choose if they're willing to put out the effort, boys so they don't go around thinking girls are inferior. I don't know the age range -- although, admittedly, I'm actually skeptical of age ranges, anyway, knowing that some children are into adult novels and nonfiction well before adulthood -- but I know I would have enjoyed it around the age of 10-12 and I wouldn't limit it to pre-high schoolers. The writing style is very modern. Sometimes that bothered me (particularly when the author said "skillz" rather than spelling the word "skills" properly) but I do think that style makes Wonder Women particularly accessible to the younger crowd and that is, of course, its intended audience.

Quirk Books is having a pre-order promotion. Included in the offer is a set of wallpapers for phone, tablet, and desktop (free with purchase) and a drawing for signed, framed prints. Click through this link to read about it and find the sign-up widget:

Pre-Order Offer: Wonder Women by Sam Maggs

The Quirk Books website is an awfully fun place to hang out, by the way. I highly recommend bookmarking it for future fun.

©2016 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear

We have Internet! So happy. Fingers and toes crossed that it will last.

First things first: Journey to Munich is #12 in the Maisie Dobbs series and I have not read any other Maisie Dobbs books. Sometimes it works to dive into a series in the middle or toward the end of a mystery series (I've done it many times) and sometimes it doesn't. Journey to Munich was a mixed experience in that way. If you're familiar with the series, you know about the heroine's past and the characters who have been prominent but died. I did not, of course. Maisie spends a lot of time reflecting on her past, which muddled things for me, but not enough to stop me from reading on. More on that in a minute.

In Journey to Munich, Maisie is asked to pose as the daughter of an industrialist who has been imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. It's 1938, Hitler is on the brink of invading two nearby countries, and Leon Donat's real daughter is not well. Donat has important knowledge that the British government wants to get their hands on, so they've begun negotiating his release (for a price);  Maisie must present the necessary documents and bring Leon Donat home.

Meanwhile, a very important man finds out about Maisie's plans to go undercover and requests her help locating his daughter, the woman Maisie blames for a tragedy in her own life (it's a spoiler if you missed #11). Maisie refreshes her German, memorizes information about Leon and his family, practices shooting a gun, and then dons a wig and takes off for Munich. I confess, I was a bit surprised how long it took for Maisie to even arrive in Munich.

In Germany, Maisie is faced with a number of challenges. The woman she's searching for is not quite what she seems, there's an American tailing her wherever she goes, Donat's story is more complex than she realized, and one particular Nazi seems to suspect her motives.

There's good and bad to Journey to Munich from the perspective of this new Maisie reader. She does put on her detective hat, so to speak, now and then. But, Journey to Munich is more a spy novel than a mystery novel. In that regard, it is probably more my type of book than a typical Maisie book. In fact, I tried the series, early on, and couldn't get into it. But, at the time I was reading almost no mysteries and I doubt it was the author's fault. I think it was more a function of my past mystery burnout holding me back. I requested an ARC of Journey to Munich because I've been gradually reading more  from the Mystery/Thriller category, in recent months, and I thought it would be a good time to give the series a second go.

My biggest problem with the book involved what I considered some minor touches of implausibility. Maisie is easily followed everywhere by an American but while the Nazis seem suspicious of her and she places herself in danger numerous times, they're never quite as threatening as anticipated. However, I did think the author did an excellent job of providing a sense of place and ramping up tension. The only other problem I had with the book was the one mentioned above. The Maisie Dobbs series is definitely best read in order. Regular Maisie readers will understand her references to The Dower House and Maurice and why she doesn't want to deal with certain people or wants them back in her life. Again, I did not.

I had no problem with the main storyline at all but did find frequent references to the past frustrating. And, yet, I liked the book enough to think, "Hmm, maybe I should start this series from the beginning." If I do, I believe I'll stop at #10. I peeked at a few reviews by Maisie lovers to get their impression and it sounds like that's where they would have liked the series to end. And, yet, I should add that Journey to Munich ends on a very hopeful note, implying that better things are to come, including the return of characters and format from the past.

Recommended - While the latest in the Maisie Dobbs series doesn't stand all that well alone, it's still perfectly readable if you have not dipped into the series in the past. I asked a friend who has read all the Maisie books what he thought and he said he didn't even notice any implausibility. He just enjoyed the book. So, my discomfort about Nazi suspicion might be the eyes of a frequent WWII novel reader at work (although the story takes place on the cusp of war, before Great Britain has declared war on Germany) and I may be a touch more picky, not being familiar with the series. I enjoyed Journey to Munich, in spite of the problems I encountered by diving into a series whose characters and past are unfamiliar, and I definitely recommend it.


©2016 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.