Recently I went to hear Australian author Natasha Lester speak at a library in a small town about half an hour away from me. The talk that she gave was absolutely fascinating. She talked about the main character in her latest novel, a French woman by the name of Marie-Madeleine Fourcade who was the only woman who led a French Resistance organisation during WWII. She shared some of her exploits in her talk, and I left that event knowing that I was going to have to read the book asap. I did have another reason for needing to read the book too. This was the book club selection for the Rachael Johns Readers Retreat that I attended last weekend and so I needed to read it before the group discussions. Natasha Lester was there as one of the authors, so I got to hear her speak again. Here she is being interviewed by Anthea Hodgson.
The story of Marie-Madeleine is absolutely fascinating. She married young and moved to Morocco where she learnt to fly, did some rally car driving and a bit of espionage which helps her husband's career! When her marriage breaks down, she returns to France with her children. There, at a party, she witnesses two men having a very intense disagreement. One is Charles de Gaulle, and the other a man who will recruit her to help create a resistance network known as Alliance, whose code name is Navarre.
Alliance worked closely with the British MI6 and provided them with a lot of information like U-boat locations and maps of the coast of France which eventually helped with the planning for the D-Day invasion. However, there is a very high cost for this information with the loss of members through arrest and death, the constant threat of betrayal, the constant moving around, always living with fear, and more.
For Marie-Madeleine the human cost of the work that she was leading was immense and it did take it's toll. Despite that she continued relying on her risk taking mentality, her intuition and those closest to her to help lead. There was a physical cost too. Some of the stories that are told in these pages seem incredibly far-fetched and yet those are the ones that are true including being smuggled to Spain, making split second decisions to leave a headquarters based on instinct alone, and sending her children away so that the Germans cannot use them to get to her.
Despite the success of her team's work, she also faced a struggle due to her sex. No one, including the Germans most of the time, could believe that a woman could lead the network and do such a great job! This is reflected in the fact that, after the war, whilst others were public acknowledged by de Gaulle for the resistance work done during the war Marie-Madeleine was not, despite several of her subordinates receiving the acknowledgement.
There is a lot of action in this book, and sometimes it was a little difficult to keep up with the constant location changes, new people in the organisation and the who was doing what in the various acts of resistance. There was also the personal story of the woman, Marie-Madeleine, who cared too much for the people that she put in harm's way but who inspired great loyalty from the people in the network, the leader who felt every death and betrayal to her very core, the mother who couldn't see her children, the woman who had a passionate love for a man who served France wholeheartedly, and the woman who gave everything that she had to fight against the Germans.
In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Lester wrote that she had been told that WWII were not as publishable as they have been because it isn't what readers want any more, and it is a sentiment that I have seen expressed multiple times in reviews. The market is saturated with WWII stories. My response is if it is WWII stories like this one, of the amazing people who gave everything and more in the fight against the enemy, those as yet unknown stories of heroes, then I still want to read them!
I am sharing this review with the New Release Challenge hosted by The Chocolate Lady's Book Reviews and with the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge which I host! This book has also been released in the US so if you would like to give this Aussie author a try, if you haven't already done so, you should be able to find it in other markets!
Rating 4.5/5
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