Nonfiction November: Fiction/Nonfiction Book Pairing

This week's topic is hosted by Katie at Doing Dewey, and it is a topic near and dear to my heart: books that go together. 

One of my favorite nonfiction books this year was A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, by Sonia Purnell, and one of my favorite novels of 2020 was Code Name Hélène, by Ariel Lawhon. Both books were about female spies during WWII who helped the French Resistance. Both were absolutely riveting. While Code Name Hélène was a novel, it was based on the life of a real person.

Here's what I wrote about A Woman of No Importance back in August: 

This is one of the best books of 2021. Could not put it down. Virginia Hall was incredible--brave, passionate, capable. She persisted. Despite a prosthetic leg. Despite the old boys network. Despite the Gestapo, betrayals, and red tape, she really, truly helped liberate France and end WWII. This is non-fiction at its finest. I started out listening to an audio version but switched to print because there are a lot of names and locations and organizations to keep track of, but a truly marvelous read. 

And here's my blurb about Code Name Helene:

I read a few reviews from other bloggers and felt this would be good. WWII, set in Marseille and the Dordogne region of France, French resistance - premise great! To be honest, during the first half I was not sure I would love it--the main character, Nancy, was a bit too perfect (beautiful, brilliant, brave, etc) but I was totally engrossed in the second half and couldn't put it down. Then, I read the afterword and learned that it was based on a real person who did all these extraordinary things.

Another nice matchup is the nonfiction book, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II, by Liza Mundy and The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn. The nonfiction is about Americans and The Rose Code is about their English counterparts working at Bletchley Park, but these two books go very nicely together and help to put the role women played in winning the war into much sharper focus. 

Side note - I loved The Rose Code so much that I listened to it a second time on a road trip. And there's a TV series under development based on the book!

Here's what I wrote about The Rose Code last spring: 

I loved the characters of The Rose Code, from socialite Osla who dated the future Duke of Edinburgh and who was based on the real-life Osla Benning to working girl Mab from London's East End to mousey Beth, and how they grew and developed and matured. The Bletchley Park setting was fascinating (now on my must-visit list) as was the process of code breaking. I loved reading about how the various departments contributed to the whole, mostly without the cogs in the machinery having an understanding of what role their cog played. Final note--the best part of the book is the last third. Reads like a thriller!

I do tend to read about a subject, whether that be code breaking and spies during WWII, or War of the Roses and Tudor history, or Italy, or Northumberland, or whatever else strikes a chord, so the matchups are usually not hard for me to make!

Hope you are all enjoying Nonfiction November.

 

Midsummer Roundup

It's that time again...snippets about books read that I haven't blogged about yet. Thank goodness I can refer to my GoodReads Read list!

The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn - excellent fictional companion to The Code Girls. The Code Girls (non-fiction) is about American WWII codebreakers and The Rose Code is about English ones, but the work and issues are similar. I loved the characters of The Rose Code, from socialite Osla who dated the future Duke of Edinburgh and who was based on the real-life Osla Benning to working girl Mab from London's East End to mousey Beth, and how they grew and developed and matured. The Bletchley Park setting was fascinating (now on my must-visit list) as was the process of code breaking. I loved reading about how the various departments contributed to the whole, mostly without the cogs in the machinery having an understanding of what role their cog played. Final note--the best part of the book is last third. Reads like a thriller!

Enigma, by Robert Harris - it feels like I'm doing a short course on WWII codebreaking, but midway through The Rose Code I decided to reread Enigma, about...you guessed it, WWII codebreaking at Bletchley Park. I know I read Enigma once upon a time, but it must've been when the kids were babies because I remembered none of it. Again, interesting setting and work and interesting characters, although this time 99% of the characters were male, so it was a different kind of story than that of The Rose Code.

A Cast of Falcons, by Steve Burrows - book 3 in the author's Birder Murder series and a terrific mystery that takes our hero, Detective Chief Inspector Dominic Jejune, from his beloved Saltmarsh in Norfork to Scotland and back with plenty of birding along the way. Dom's mysterious brother is a central figure in this book and is a charming addition. Hope we see more of him in future stories.

Booked to Die, by John Dunning - another reread, but I did remember bits and pieces of this one! Set in Denver, Cliff Janeway is a police detective with an eye and love for rare books. In the course of the mystery, he takes the leap from disgruntled employee to entreprenuer, opening his own rare book store in Denver's Book Row neighborhood. It was great fun reading about Denver, Evergreen, and even Longmont in a book-centric book. This is the first in the Cliff Janeway series, and I'm planning on reading the rest in the series. Cliff Janeway is very, very similar to Lovejoy, the British antiques dealer who stumbles upon murder after murder.

Faithful, by Alice Hoffman - I read this with the GoodReads group, True Book Talk, and it was absolutely excellent. Hoffman is a prolific author, and I've only read one other by her, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, which was okay but Faithful is far the superior book. Early on, it reminded me of The Horse Whisperer in that a young girl survives an accident that leaves her friend dead and must dig her way out of the grief and guilt that nearly buries her alive. I absolutely loved the main character, Shelby, and the NYC setting for most of the book. As much as anything else, this is a coming of age story in which Shelby matures as she rebuilds her life and constructs a family out of the strays (canine and human) that she rescues and that rescue her. I'm still not altogether sure how the title fits the story, but it has been interesting thinking about the word faithful and all that it implies when analyzed.

And now it's on to the dog days of summer, headed up to the mountains for a little break, but packing a case full of books to read while I enjoy the flowers and fruits of the season.

Hope you all stay well and remember to read on!