Read This Book…

Twin sisters Ruth Macallister and Iris Digby couldn’t be more dissimilar, even as children. But they never thought that one argument in Rome in 1940 would result in years of estrangement. When Iris and her family disappear from London in 1948, Ruth is as surprised as anyone else. But she has a suspicion that the rumors swirling around her sister’s husband are true, and they defected to the Soviet Union.

Four years later, Ruth herself is living a somewhat charmed life in New York City, running things behind the scenes at a swanky modeling agency. So when she gets a postcard from her sister out of the blue, she’s shocked…but she knows something is wrong. And so does FBI agent Sumner Fox, who begins asking questions about Iris. It turns out that her sister really is in Soviet Russia…and she’s desperate to get out.

As Ruth and Sumner come up with a daring extraction plan that will have them posing as newlyweds, we also get Iris’s side of her marriage, going back to 1940 when she fell in love with a dashing young American diplomat with rather unconventional ideals…and between the two sisters, a bigger story emerges.

I know that a ton of WWII and post-war fiction has been published in the past few years (I love Kate Quinn!), and it can sometimes be difficult to sort through what’s good and what’s meh, but I really enjoyed this one. I liked the tension between the dual narratives and timelines, and Ruth’s breezy tone contrasted against Iris’s more serious, but passionate voice. The spy elements were very interesting but not overdone, and I kind of enjoyed that, actually. I suspect that in reality, spy craft is probably 99% boring and 1% thrilling, and for me the pull of this book was in the sisters’ dynamic and the fact that they were constantly misunderstanding and misreading each other in profound and fundamental ways…but they also still care deeply for each other. They just happen to be caught up in greater forces and ideologies beyond them, and the choices they made kept driving them apart, but didn’t break their relationship. The book had its moments of suspense, and a few little twists that I didn’t see coming, and it was enough that I was manufacturing all sorts of excuses to keep listening to the audiobook.