Sue’s Reviews > Mother Daughter Traitor Spy > Status Update

Veronica nodded. She was scared, too—but she wasn’t about to back down. Not like Chamberlain, with his “peace in our time.” She remembered what her father used to say about his days in the Navy: The only time you back down is when you’re dead.

She drew herself up, let herself out, went to one of the sinks, and washed her hands with cold water. They were no longer trembling as she reapplied her lipstick, her war paint. Staring at her face in the mirror, she pressed her lips together and made a final, irrevocable decision. Housewife turned spy. No one would ever believe it. Not in a hundred years. She tried not to laugh

Her mother had made her linen trousers and a blouse for her, and she’d styled her outfit with the backward-worn cotton cardigan so popular at Hunter, a green floral scarf in her hair, and chunky Bakelite bracelets

. “As Martha Gellhorn wrote to Max Perkins, ‘If a writer has any guts he should write all the time, and the lousier the world the harder a writer should work. For if he can do nothing positive, to make the world more livable or less cruel or stupid, he can at least record truly, and that’s something no one else will do, and it’s a job that must be done.’ She believed those words. She lived those words.

They force-fed us,” Vi said in a flat voice. She pushed her plate away. “It doesn’t sound that bad, maybe, but it was awful. They shoved tubes down our throats. It was painful and degrading. And dangerous.”

Well, that’s the shadow that accompanies the light of democracy, sweetheart,” Wally said, helping himself to more salad. “People are free to abuse their freedoms.”