Tag Archives: Kate Quinn

#BookReview ‘The Briar Club’ by @Kate_Quinn #thriller #mystery

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Oh what a tangle this story is, in a good way. The Briar Club by Kate Quinn is about the women renting rooms at Briarwood House, a down-at-heel all-female boarding house in Washington DC. Starting off as a group of individuals, they slowly bond at their Thursday supper night. Kate QuinnThe story starts on the night Thanksgiving in 1954 with a prologue in the voice of the house. There’s a dead body in the attic and there is blood everywhere. Police are questioning witnesses. The narrative then backtracks four years. Set in the post-war McCarthy era when communists are reported by friends, family, neighbours and colleagues, at the time of this story no one feels immune from threat of denunciation. Not Bea, the former baseball player with a dodgy knee. Not Fliss, mother of baby Angela, both waiting for Fliss’s doctor husband Dan to come home from the Korean war. Not Nora, secretary at the National Archives, whose police officer brother steals her rent money.
At first The Briar Club seems long and languorous, taking its time to tell the background story of each female lodger one at a time. This is a clever device that first shows each woman as the others see them, the assumptions made, prejudices assumed, judgements taken; then the real person is revealed in their own viewpoint, the experiences that made them who they are today, the twists and turns of life that made them behave and speak as they do. But then there is a dead body in the attic apartment and the tangles become twisted, knotted and dangerous to everyone. Is it a lover’s tiff or something more sinister? Is it the reds? This is the time of the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] investigations, set against a rough Washington background of gangsters, sleaze, knife crime and wife-beating. The Thursday night Briar Club get-together gives the women a safe place to be themselves.
The first voice we hear in 1950 doesn’t belong to one of the lodgers but to Pete Nilsson, son of the landlady. When Pete is on the front stoop mending the screen door, he is interrupted by a tall woman wearing a red beret. She enquires about a room to rent and 13-year old Pete instantly falls in love. Grace March takes the dingy room, as big as a shoebox with dull green walls. Grace is the sun around which the lodgers and the story revolve. She is both at the centre of everything, seemingly all-knowing, all-seeing, but remaining an enigma. It is Grace who suggests a Thursday night supper club, it is Grace who encourages the other ladies to club together to buy spectacles for Pete’s younger sister Lina, and it is Grace who first encourages Lina’s attempts at baking despite the frequent burnt offerings. She is the bringer of light and flowers into a grubby house, the one who notices everything and knows how to keep a secret.
The stately telling of a complicated story, slow for the first 60% until the strands become entwined, character connections are made and deeply-held secrets and opinions are unveiled. From the beginning this is a consummate picture of the lives of women in 1950s Washington DC at the time of the communist witch hunts. Opportunities for women are changing post-war though many are still trapped by marriage, racism, expectations and low wages. The story starts with a mystery that becomes consuming as the paths of the fictional women cross with real-life historical people and events. And I loved that the house is given its own voice, because Briarwood House too seems a member of the Briar Club.
Very good. Slower in parts than the other Quinn novels I’ve read. All are different and I’ve enjoyed every one of them. The Briar Club morphed from a 4* to a 5* towards the end as I realised I wanted to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

Here are my reviews of two other novels by Kate Quinn:-
THE DIAMOND EYE
THE ROSE CODE

If you like this, try:-
‘Shrines of Gaiety’ by Kate Atkinson
‘Before the Fall’ by Noah Hawley
‘The Chase’ by Ava Glass #1ALIASEMMA

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BRIAR CLUB by @Kate_Quinn https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-8mt via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Heather Marshall

#BookReview ‘The Diamond Eye’ by @Kate_Quinn #WW2

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What a wonderful book is The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn. The fictionalised story of a real Soviet female sniper fighting in what is now Ukraine in the early years of the Second World War, this is a novel I didn’t want to put down. Kate QuinnThe life of Kiev resident Mila Pavlichenko, young mother and history student, changes when the Nazis invade. Already an accomplished shot with a rifle, she leaves her young son Slavka with her mother and goes off to war. In the 18 months of her time on the frontline as a sniper, the real Mila scored 309 official ‘kills’. She is injured fighting in Sevastapol and, once recovered, is ordered to join a diplomatic mission to the USA to persuade the Americans to join the European war. The action in America is probably the most fictionalised part of The Diamond Eye which is based in part on Mila’s memoir. Quinn states in her Author’s Note that parts of the memoir are clearly Mila’s own voice, other entries seem like Soviet propaganda.
This is not just a war story with guns and death and trenches. Quinn tells the story of a young woman, torn from all that is familiar, who finds strength inside herself and with her comrade snipers, to do what must be done. Some of her fellow soldiers have brief times at her side; others, the most skilled snipers, survive. She discovers how difficult it is, when you know you may die tomorrow, to open yourself up to friendship, or love. She acquires a nickname, ‘Lady Death,’ and spurns the frequent attentions of her senior officers. Her girlfriends also volunteer, her estranged husband turns up as a combat surgeon, but there are few light moments in her life. Her primary motivation is to defend her homeland, that is the only thing keeping her away from home. Between missions she gathers leaves and sends them to Slavka, she carries her dissertation with her and takes it from her backpack to read to remember the life she once had. Quinn alternates the dark story of Mila’s fighting, first at Odesa and then at Sevastapol, with her later trip to Washington in 1942 plus excerpts from the diary of the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who Mila met on that trip.
This is a shocking story and a compelling one. The sections about sniper technique and tactics are not for the faint-hearted but the current war in Ukraine adds a reality check and there are light-hearted moments in Washington as Mila meets the American press, not alerting her hosts to the fact that she can speak English. Also lightly woven through the fighting sections are snippets of Russian folklore, a reminder that Mila’s country has roots and traditions much older than the Soviet Union.
Quinn creates a heroine we care for. Brave and determined with a sharp edge of sarcasm, this is Mila’s story as imagined by the author. The two parts of the story – the fighting, the subsequent trip to America – are key to the growth of an unusual and exceptional young woman. So what if the final section lurches into ‘thriller’ territory, it made the pages turn even faster.
Highly recommended.

Here are my reviews of other novels by Kate Quinn:-
THE BRIAR CLUB
THE ROSE CODE

If you like this, try:-
‘The Bear and the Nightingale’ by Katherine Arden #1WINTERNIGHT
‘Midnight in Europe’ by Alan Furst
‘Corpus’ by Rory Clements #1TOMWILDE

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE DIAMOND EYE by @Kate_Quinn https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5QW via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Rose Code’ by @Kate_Quinn #WW2 #Bletchley

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The Rose Code by Kate Quinn is the first book I’ve read by this author. I was drawn in by the WW2 setting and promise of mystery, but it’s much more than that. There are two timelines; 1947 as the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth approaches, and 1939 at the outbreak of war. At its centre are three young women who don’t quite fit into their worlds. War introduces something new to their lives. Opportunity. Advancement. Recognition. Friendship. Home. Kate QuinnMabs has grown up in Shoreditch but longs to escape. She follows her own plan of improvement – reading the classics, copying the accents of assistants in upper class shops – with the long-term aim of rescuing her younger sister Lucy from poverty. Osla is a Canadian society girl, rich, pretty, labelled as a dim deb who trains as a riveter to make Hurricanes. Both have mysterious interviews and are sent on a train journey to ‘Station X’. This turns out to be a large country mansion – Bletchley Park – where secret war work is undertaken. Both must sign the Official Secrets Act before they are admitted. At their lodgings, they meet Beth, downtrodden daughter of their strict religious landlady Mrs Finch.
Beth’s skill at crosswords is recognised and soon all three girls are working at ‘BP’. In their jobs – typing, translating, decoding – the three girls get to know each other and, despite the rules of secrecy, they learn how gossip inside ‘BP’ works. Soon they are promoted, learning top secret information before it is transmitted to government, before even Churchill. And with knowledge comes power, and danger.
We follow the three through romances – Osla with young naval officer, Prince Philip of Greece – and bombings. There is something to like and dislike about each woman making them realistic, rounded characters. Mab was my favourite, Osla slightly irritating, while Beth changes the most throughout the course of the book. The 1947 strand becomes a hunt for a traitor as the Cold War gets colder and a former WW2 ally becomes the enemy. The girls must revisit their wartime secrets to question the nature of truth and loyalty, to each other and to their country.
The Second World War is often thought of as a time of liberation for women doing the jobs of men and in some ways it was; but Quinn shows this was a transitory advantage – temporary, class driven, certain jobs only – and women were still ultimately dependant on a man in so many ways. As the women look back at their former lives we see how much, and how little, has changed for them.
Some of the coding puzzles went straight over my head but that didn’t really matter. The Bletchley setting is great, the gossip of the weekly scandal rag, the familiar names dropped – Alan Turing, Joan Clarke – the book club and 3am kidneys on toast. I’m not sure the 1947 royal wedding deadline adds much to the narrative, there’s enough threat without it. As I was getting towards the end of the book and was interrupted, I snatched up the book again at the next possible opportunity.

Here are my reviews of other novels by Kate Quinn:-
THE BRIAR CLUB
THE ROSE CODE

If you like this, try:-
‘Life After Life’ by Kate Atkinson
‘Another You’ by Jane Cable
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ROSE CODE by @Kate_Quinn https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5lQ via @SandraDanby