There's a Reason I Didn't Finish This One

[Nancy]

When I saw this sitting on the featured book shelf at the library and remembered I had taken it back unfinished, I knew I had a solution for this difficult category. It was difficult for me because I am a compulsive finisher and rarely give up on any book.

Now that I've finished it, I wonder: why? Why take what turns out to have been the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story of Violette Morris, a Women's World Games medalist, Olympic aspirant, auto racer, Hitler pal and Gestapo torturer and turn it into fiction, then hide it among a confusing welter of poorly developed tales of other World War II adventurers?

Author Prose had done all the research for a non- fiction hit. She "soon decided that [she] would have more liberty, and that [her] readers and [she] would have more fun" if she wrote it as fiction. This might be because there are (at least) two biographies in French of this evil woman; perhaps the ground is already well-ploughed.

I did enjoy the way minor incidents cropped up with different interpretations in different narrators' stories (there are four other narrators beside the one who tells the story of Lou Villars, the fictional Violette). The drive back to Paris from the Baroness' POV and that of the photographer comes to mind here. But overall: no better than OK.

48 of 50/52

[Annerlee]

Nancy wrote: "When I saw this sitting on the featured book shelf at the library and remembered I had taken it back unfinished, I knew I had a solution for this difficult category. It was difficult for me because..."

Well done for sticking with it!