This is also part of my, “Okay, universe, just tell me what to read” campaign. This book has a lot of my catnip: lady spies, a dual chronology, and a host of people trying to put their lives back together after a war.

In 1947, Charlotte “Charlie” St. Clair is in England with her mother. She’s on her way to Switzerland for an abortion. She’s a college sophomore, unmarried, and her parents have decided that the way to handle her unplanned pregnancy is to remove it.  What she really wants, however, is to find her cousin Rose, who disappeared in France during WWII. Rose is the only person in Charlie’s family to understand Charlie, and Charlie is desperate to find her.

In 1915, Eve Gardinier is recruited to be a spy for the Allies. She’s stationed in Lille, France, which is near the Belgian border and occupied by the Germans. She speaks French, English, and German, and has one of those faces that looks completely innocent and incapable of lying. She gets a job in a cafe where German officers congregate, eavesdrops on them while clearing their plates, and passes any interesting and useful information on to the British. Her contact is a woman who calls herself Lili, and she has a network of spies and contacts up and down the border, called the Alice Network.

The main theme of the WWI portion is “How can I serve.” Eve, in her life in England, wants to serve her country, but no one will allow her, simply because she has a stammer. Because of the stammer, people assume she’s stupid or mentally disabled. But the captain in charge of running spies in France recognizes her talents and gives her a way to serve. The other women in the Alice Network are in similar positions: this option was the best way they had to help with the war effort. Of course, sometimes the desire to serve, to help with all of your abilities, costs a great deal, and there’s the question if you’re really willing to pay that price. Eve finds herself paying a great deal more than she ever expected, for decades.

The theme of the post WWII portions is related: what is the human cost of all this war and suffering? Eve is still suffering from the psychological (and physical) effects of her service in WWI. Eve has a driver, Finn, a Scotsman who was part of the group that liberated one of the concentration camps, and that experience still haunts him. Charlie, who was in high school during the war, did not serve, but her brother came back a different person, and eventually killed himself. Charlie’s response to that trauma was to try to find a way to feel things again by sex, which did not work out the way she intended.

The trick with a dual chronology is making sure the two stories weave together and come to a climax that complement each other. The other trick is making sure your two timelines are equally interesting. I found myself skimming the 1947 story to get back to the WWI story, which was  LOT more tense. 1947 was road trip through post-war France; 1915 was espionage. Which is more exciting?

Quinn included, probably because she saw me coming, an extensive author’s note talking about how Lili was a real person, Louise de Bettignies, who did everything she does in this book.  I know there aren’t any spoilers in history, but if you don’t know about Louise, and her service record, and you’re going to read The Alice Network, maybe… don’t… read her Wikipedia page? (We didn’t link to it on purpose.) I had no idea how this story was going to go, and I didn’t know that Lili was a real person, so I was on the edge of my seat after the 2/3 mark.

The other thing that I enjoyed was the minutiae of spy craft, such as writing messages on slips of rice paper and winding them around hairpins, or drawing maps on petticoats. Or, ways to sneak past a border checkpoint when you don’t have the right paperwork – all the details are fascinating.

There is a romance. It’s not centered in the plot, it develops very slowly and organically, and the meat of this novel is the relationships between the women. They learn how to become a honeypot, if that’s what is required, how to support each other in the darkest of timelines, and how to continue to live after everything you ever knew was torn away from you.

If you read and loved Code Name Verity ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au ) this is a book for you. I said a couple of years ago that I expected a lot of World War I stories to come out of this centennial, and I’m pretty pleased to have been right. There are a lot of really interesting stories emerging.  I’m also really interested (for various reasons) in how people deal with the PTSD that come out of traumatic periods in history, and this story is a deeply layered exploration of just that.