Marquise's Reviews > Resistance Women

I must have the most rotten luck when trying to find good historical novels about the Rote Kapelle resistance group, because what I find tends to be too romanticised (in the romance novel sense) or an utterly dull recitation of history book chunks trying to pass for a novel.

Resistance Women is, sadly, the latter sort. It may fare better with an audience unfamiliar with Mildred Harnack, Martha Dodd, and Greta Kuckhoff, the three women (plus a fictional one), who are the women in the title and heroines of the civilian resistance against Hitler; but to me that am acquainted with their stories and that of the other members, the book required too much effort in order to finish it. And the reason was the monotonous recitation of fact after fact, scene after scene, name after name, that came from Chiaverini's storytelling. I commend the research that went into this and the preoccupation with historical accuracy (though there are mistakes), but this isn't a non-fiction account, and telling a story is important. I am able to read and get engrossed by novels about events I know well, I wouldn't read so much WWII historical fiction if I couldn't, so all I ask for is to be told a story engagingly, to be made to care in spite of knowing what's going to happen in the end, not to be made to feel like I'm rereading all my WWII history books all over again. Hence, my disappointment in this novel runs deep because I find this group so very fascinating and brave.

Also, History does, indeed, tend to repeat itself, but the enthusiasm for drawing careless parallels between WWII and nowadays is quite tiresome, especially when it's poorly argued or not argued at all.