It’s about a badass female spy during WWII? Aka a real Peggy Carter! I thought it would help with prompts for my peggysous fanfiction.
more under the cut
My thoughts
This book never really constructs a solid narrative, it just sort of drifts from anecdote to anecdote in a vaguely chronological way. I found that super annoying, and it made it hard to stay engaged. It assumes you already know a lot about World War II. It does have a lot of ridiculously interesting tidbits here and there, sprinkled between a lot of dry listing of locations and names.
What I learned
Before WWII spies were super unorganized. Vera Atkins actually worked for a spy service that wasn’t completely sanctioned by the government, had to deal with a competing spy service, and actually started building a network of contacts long before the war actually broke out. Her organization specialized in closework, which was the collection and transmission of intelligence mixed with sabotage and assassination.
Her spy service was actually closely aligned with William Donovan who ended up founding the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) and there was a huge amount of cooperation between the UK and Americans before either country officially joined the war. This makes the British Peggy Carter ending up working in an American based SSR seem less farfetched.
Also this book will tell you where Ian Fleming got the “shaken not stirred” recipe from, if that’s a thing you want to know.
The Verdict
As frustrating as this was to read, I did glean a number of details of spy life back then that will make for more interesting stories, as well as some ideas for original characters. Read it if you really like history.
