Authors should definitely, absolutely be able to change up their MO. No one expects that they’re automatons, churning out crowd pleasers–in fact, there are a few authors who have made explicit that the pressure of pleasing fans sapped the joy of writing, thereby leading to even less author-ing.
That all aside, I find myself somewhat disappointed by this latest foray into Kate Quinnland, as I know it from The Alice Network and The Rose Code, the latter of which I enjoyed quite a bit. As always, there is action taking place in two time periods (here, the historical period starts only a few years before the present, and rapidly catches up) and there’s a woman at the center, toiling away in relative obscurity and yet changing the course of history in some small way.
There are a few things that land a bit oddly in this iteration. The first, for me at least, is the Ukrainian/Russian identity elements, which the author’s note makes clear are historically accurate–the real-life Lady Death sniper whose story is fictionalized here was herself ethnically Ukrainian but always identified as Russian–but it’s a bit weird to read about those little tidbits against the backdrop of Putin’s illegitimate war against Ukraine in the modern day.
The second is the lack of female friendship, or even close female relationships (the one that Mila has with Eleanor Roosevelt, I suppose, is the stand in this time around). I suppose it’s just the truth that the real-life Lyudmila Pavlichenko didn’t strike up friendships with a merry band of snipers during the war, but truth in fiction is not why I wanted to read this book–there’s an element of escapism that I wished I could have had, imagining a battalion of Russian ladies with rifles sniping down German Nazis.
The third is again likely my fault–now that I read as much as I do, certain plot beats have started to seem inevitable, even if the [love triangle] here is a variant of the plot from [Pearl Harbor]. Lastly, I found it hard to care as much about the villain this time around as I did in the prior instances–lack of a revenge motivation, perhaps?
I don’t want to gripe too much about how this book isn’t like the other book I read which I liked, but I suppose that’s what my review boils down to. It’s an engaging book, for sure, and there’s satisfying character arcs to be had, but it’s not dethroning her other works for me.
