Really light and funny. Probably half my rating is because I just really needed a lighthearted book right now but I enjoyed it a lot.

So much fun. There were parts that were heartbreaking and parts that were hilarious. So well written and loved the friendships between the women. There’s something special about women who advocate for and strengthen each other, especially when they previously have not known that sort of friendship.

Loved the mystery with the shoes and Sam’s and Nisha’s stories and the growth in them both. Yes there were parts that felt far fetched but by then I didn’t mind. I did feel so awful for Sam so many times and just wanted to slap a few people for her - the book had you that invested in each of the characters. Just really well done. I didn’t want to put it down.

Nana Jean is my favorite - so funny. Enjoyed the family-centered and fun story. Great perspective of being ok with not being perfect but being honest with those who love you.

By the time I hit about 30% I was struggling to finish this one. The premise of life in France during WW2 was a good one, but the writing was clunky and didn’t flow well, and there was so much repetition in the book - same conversations, same scenarios, revisiting the same feelings or decisions - that it became a task to get thru.

It also had sections that seemed random and didn’t add or lend anything to the story besides length. There was far more that could have been expounded on to make it interesting like Lucie’s forgeries but instead it was every possible description of creating tracts, or else random events for Lucie, like walking in the park, the dead swan, Emile in every scenario, elaboration at length, etc. I just lost interest really quickly.

Some of the dialogue choice was also weird and out of place. I could only think of Margot as being from Brooklyn, not Britain the way she talked, for example.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy of this book. Opinions are solely mine.

Such an amazing story of 2 real women, one in the SOE and the other, a French resister hiding and smuggling out Allied airmen stuck in France. The book itself was admittedly very slow, and that and the primarily narrative style with only little intermittent dialogue is not my favorite. But the story itself was so inspiring, what the humans spirit is capable of and how much these women and so many others sacrificed.

I really enjoyed learning the history of Black women serving in WW2 in the WAC. The writing style was good and there was a lot of great history in this book. However, the reason I dropped a star was one of the two main characters, Grace, turned out to be rather unlikeable in my opinion. She was constantly judgmental, bitter and resentful thru the entire book and it became obnoxious really quickly. Eliza, the other main character, was a little better but could also be spiteful towards Grace as well. I much prefer stories where women look out for each other, give each other the benefit of the doubt, and are just plain kind to each other. This part of the book was really disappointing to me.

There was a lot of really great information in this book in learning how to support an autistic child and how they see the world, especially with autistic girls since it’s so different than autistic boys often.

My teenage daughter was just diagnosed with autism and I’ve been reading and researching everything I can to help her and learn how to better parent her with this new understanding of her brain differences.

The only real reason I dropped my rating is because there was just a lot of unnecessary discussion of gender fluidity in this, and often presented as a discussion of how to parent with (or live as an adult as) a non-binary or trans identity - rather than keep it specific to autism. The entire 27th chapter alone was completely about the person’s trans experience - not their autistic experience - who just happened to be diagnosed with autism. It felt like the book got derailed with a poor misdirection and loss of focus for what’s supposed to be specific to autism, what pertains to autism, the autistic perspective, and thriving with autism. Not sexual identification discussion.

It could have been a fantastic book if it just kept the singular focus of what it stated it was for.