Play Book Tag discussion

This story is told from three points of view. In the mid-1940s in Boston, Jordan is a teenager who has been raised by her single father. He remarries a woman whom Jordan simultaneously loves and mistrusts. In 1950, Ian, Tony and Nina are Nazi hunters, and are after a woman, The Huntress, who killed Ian’s brother and tried to kill Nina during the war. Nina is the only one who escaped. And finally we have Nina’s story, pre-WW2 in Siberia and during WW2 as a pilot for the Red Army.

Well, Kate Quinn has done it again. Another fascinating war story, with a cast of colourful three-dimensional characters. Nina was all kinds of awesome, but I think I actually liked Jordan’s simplicity more. Her relationship with her photography was super well written, and I loved how it was used throughout the novel.

The one criticism I have is that I often had to remind myself that it was set in the fifties and it wasn’t a contemporary novel. Some novels make us feel the timeline, without necessarily mentioning it, but this one felt a tad unanchored, which irritated me slightly sometimes. Like, if a character had pulled out a cellphone, I wouldn’t have immediately realized it was a complete anachronism.

However, I did love that she mentioned in a note after the story that even though all her characters were fictional, most of the things that happened were based on real WW2 people or events.