She’s a trademark Quinn heroine: feisty and whip-smart and utterly unwilling to take guff from any man. Of course, things don’t go quite as he planned, and he ultimately ends up dead in the forest, while Mila emerges as a hero.Īs is always the case with Quinn’s heroines, I found myself falling in love with Mila from the very first page. Mila represents everything he loathes, and he takes a special pleasure in playing a key role in what will, he thinks, be her downfall.
While Eleanor’s commentaries provide us a glimpse into her mind as she tends to her husband amid his burdens as President, those of the marksman are replete with a vicious sort of misogyny. Throughout the novel, Mila’s perspective is interlaced with two other points of view: short little interleafs by Roosevelt and longer chapters narrated in the third person by an unnamed marksman tasked with both assassinating Franklin Roosevelt and placing the blame on the famous Russian sniper.
While there, she becomes embroiled in a sinister plot against the President's life and, upon her return, becomes a teacher, even as she also maintains a strong friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Soon enough, she shows just how skilled she is with a rifle, and she notches over 300 Nazi kills before being dispatched to the United States on a goodwill tour, in an effort to sway Franklin Roosvelt and a reluctant American populace to open a front in Europe. Born in Kiev, she starts out as a university student but, driven to do her part to protect her country from the Nazi assault, she joins the army. The book focuses on Mila Pavlichenko, famed sniper of the Soviet army during World War II. In her most recent novel, The Diamond Eye, Quinn has delivered what is arguably her best work yet, and that’s truly saying something. With each subsequent novel, she has honed her (already incredibly sharp) abilities to tell riveting stories about badass women making the most of often tremendously difficult circumstances. I’ve been a fan of Kate Quinn’s historical fiction for years now, ever since I read her first novel, Mistress of Rome, way back when I was in graduate school.
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