Review: Code Name Hélène by Ariel Lawhon

Author Ariel Lawhon takes the remarkable life and achievements of war hero Nancy Wake and spins them into an utterly addictive story of a marriage, wartime and fighting back against injustice. Two parallel storylines make up this novel. The first is of Wake's time in France as a freelance journalist and her meeting and eventual marriage to Henry Fiocca, a man who refused to reveal her whereabouts to the Gestapo right up to the end. The second tells of her arrival in Occupied France by parachute in 1944 and her important role within the French Resistance which helped to save the life of thousands. 

The author portrays Nancy Wake as a plucky young woman determined not to sit on the sidelines while there are so many grave injustices happening all around her. It is also the story of a marriage--of two people so devoted to one another that even arrest, drawn out torture and the threat of imminent execution cannot break up. The prose is addictive, with plenty of cliffhanger chapter endings and descriptions of dangerous situations. Consequently, I found myself reading 'just one more chapter' until the book was unexpectedly finished a little after one in the morning.

My only real grumble with this one is that the occasional bit of American slang creeps in, though it is not enough to ruin the flow or authenticity of the story.

Anyway, this one is a ripping read, based on the life of a truly remarkable and awe inspiring woman.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my copy of Code Name Hélène.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more