Author: Susan Elia MacNeal
Started: August 18, 2022
Finished: August 21, 2022
It's June 1940, and Veronica Grace is walking across the state at Hunter College in New York as valedictorian to give her speech not realizing that in hours her life will take a huge turn. When her job at Mademoiselle magazine is rescinded when it is discovered she had a relationship with a married man, she and her mother, Vi, make a cross-country move to allow her to have the career in journalism she has studied for. When she goes on a job interview she discovers that she has wandered into the hotbed of Nazi activity in California. As she turns to the authorities and realizes they are not going to help her, she and her mother, who has had her own run-in with Nationalists, are recruited as spies to help the government gather as much information as possible about what is being planned. When they help uncover possible violent uprising, they have to decide if they want to remain spies or return to their civilian lives.
I thought the premise for this story was quite unique as I had never seen it done in any historical fiction I had previously read. I was genuinely surprised to know that it was based on an actual mother-daughter spy team and I was fascinated by the way in which their story was used. This was a very different historical fiction as it shows a Nazi threat here in the USA which I had not given much thought to. I had never read anything by Susan Elia MacNeal, and I am curious to see what else her stories offer.