The Diamond Eye, received from Jonathan Ball Publishers for review, is the new historical novel by Kate Quinn, author of such bestsellers as The Rose Code and The Alice Network. Based on a true story, Quinn’s latest offering is a haunting novel about a mother who becomes a sniper, about heroism born of desperation, and about a woman who carves out her place in the world and changes the course of history forever.
I’m an admirer of Quinn’s not only because of her engaging style of writing but also due to her copious amounts of careful research and the accuracy with which she sculpts her novels. Indeed, this novel reads more like a biography of Lyudmila “Mila” Pavlichenko, the famous Russian war sniper, than it does historical fiction. Quinn acknowledges in her author’s notes that much of the characters and events that she relates were lifted straight from Mila’s personal memoir.
It’s an interesting point in time that Quinn chose to publish a novel with a Russian protagonist, as most of the Western world currently has very little sympathy for anything Russia. Yet, it was only a little over seven decades ago when Russians were under siege from Hitler’s troops and lost thousands in protecting their country against (actual!) Nazism.
Mila Pavlichenko, recently separated from her husband, is a nerdy history student in Kiev. She has a young son born from a hasty teenage marriage and works in a library when the Nazis invade Russia and Mila feels obliged, as an accomplished marksman, to play her part in defending her country.
Leaving her son in the care of her parents, Mila joins the fight at the front and her skill as a sniper soon earns her the name of Lady Death, the lethal Nazi hunter. When the news of her three-hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila is recalled from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and is packed off to America on a goodwill tour to raise support for Russia’s fight against Nazism.
Still reeling from war wounds and a devastating bereavement, Mila finds herself isolated and lonely in the glitzy world of Washington DC where she is expected to address vast crowds. She strikes up an unlikely friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, develops an equally unexpected connection with her sniper partner, and starts to see glimmers of happiness.
Quinn maintains the suspense throughout, keeping the reader on tenterhooks as Mila plays deadly cat-and-mouse games with old enemies and new, pushing her sniper skills to the limit.
As always, Quinn’s characters are well-rounded and convincing, making for a rich and vivid page-turner. I also gained a fresh perspective on the realities of the invasion of Russia by the skilled and well-equipped German army and what the cost was to those brave Russian fighters, and of course, the pressure placed on the snipers who protected their front lines.
I found myself immersed in the relentless struggle of these men and women as they fought day and night to keep the enemy at bay. So immersed, that it was as though I was there with Mila, tasting the acrid gun smoke, feeling the hunger pangs and experiencing the devastating toll of taking the life of another human with the squeeze of a trigger.
Getting into the head of a real-life heroine made this one of my best reads of the year so far.
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