Review: The Diamond Eye (Kate Quinn) Another real winner, after The Huntress and The Rose Code! This is a page-turner novel, so well-researched and yet fictionalized enough to create a satisfying and cohesive tale of an amazing woman Russian sniper in the early years of WWII. Kate Quinn is the author who helped me discover the women fighter pilots who did so much for the defense of Russian (part of the Huntress), and now has helped me discover the reality of how quickly a world war can upend an ordered life and turn "ordinary" citizens into combat soldiers. Mila just wanted to be a historian, to earn her degree and find a university post to support herself and her son (as a single mother, and her story of a forced marriage and child at age 15, subsequently abandoned by the father, true facts that Kate Quinn uses to create a particular potent thread in her novel). She enlists immediately when her homeland (Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union) is invaded by the Hitlerites. There is more than one love story and far more than one detailed recounting of the life of a sniper. The book pivots from Ukraine to Washington, as (really!) Mila was sent with a Russian delegation as ambassadors hoping to influence Roosevelt to begin a second front in the European theater to come to the aid of the beleaguered Russians. Meanwhile (invented fiction), there is an assassination plot in progress to kill the president but have it appear to be Mila as the perpetrator, but her burgeoning friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt (real!) helps foil the attempt and gives the author a way of introducing the goodwill ambassador tour of America which Mila and fellow Russians participated in (real!). The story is told in the first person in Mila's voice (with the exception of notes written by Eleanor Roosevelt), so one is assured at the outset that she is likely to survive, but the horrors of war are not glossed over. A sad yet hopeful book, and a great read.

on the bench near the entrances