I really enjoy the heroines Kate Quinn uses as the inspiration for her novels, but I've really felt both this and the Rose Code could have done with a significant editing. I appreciate she is trying to be thorough and genuinely bringing these women to an audience who may never of heard of them but it made the first three quarters of the book a real slog - and I enjoy military history!! As ever though, the ending snapped along so quickly - Mila and Eleanor Roosevelt's friendship twinned with the fictional side of the story really worked and tied up nicely.

Louise Eldrich is most certainly the best person I can think of to write a book covering the vastness of 2020 - pandemic, the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests, isolation, family, small businesses, elections and community...all wrapped together with some of the best magical realism I have encountered in a book in a very long time. This should be the book in 10 years people read to understand our journey through what feels like it could be an era, but so cleverly written by Eldrich is only a year. Absolutely outstanding.