~ Inspired by True Events ~ A beautiful American spy flees into the night. On her own, she must live by her wits to evade capture and make it to the safety of the Allied forces. Lily Saint James grew up traveling the European continent, learning languages as she went. In 1938, her mother’s abrupt death brings her back home to Washington, D.C., and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lily comes … Harbor, Lily comes to the attention of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Her knowledge of German, French, and Italian makes her the perfect OSS Agent, and her quick thinking places her as a nanny in the household of an important German Army Colonel, where she is able to gather intelligence for the Allies. After her marketplace contact goes missing, she makes a late-night trip to her secondary contact only to find him under interrogation by the SS. She flees into the frigid winter night carrying false identification papers, that are now dangerous, and a mini film cartridge with vital strategic information. In order to survive, Lily must make it out of Germany, into the hands of Allied-controlled France, through a path fraught with peril.
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The Brass Compass is the tale of Lily Saint James, a female operative of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the precursor of the modern CIA. But more than that, it’s a tale of women in a war that tends to focus on men, largely because the major players (at least publicly) such as Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin, were all men. Lily is a delightful heroine and protagonist; she is plucky, resourceful, clever, and above all, human. Despite her amazing skills, she has moments of self-doubt, of fear and despair, that keep her from feeling like a James Bond-esque super-spy, even when her efforts to escape the hostile (both geographically AND geopolitically) German landscape seem to render her fairly super-human. She is a marvelous combination of innocent, savant, and Everywoman. Throughout her life, she plays the hand she is dealt even when everything in her rebels against the constraints (real and perceived) of family, society, and government – and even when the deck seems stacked rather heavily against her. And she not only plays it, she plays it with aplomb.
Lily’s harrowing travels through the wilds of Germany, the see-saw of Switzerland, and the mania of Occupied France offer a slightly different picture of Europe at the end of World War Two than I’ve seen before. There’s a slightly off-kilter feel; the evocative writing allows the reader to join Lily in questioning everyone around her (and even her own motives, at times) as she wonders who can be trusted and how she is going to not only navigate to freedom but live with herself once she gets there… This is a story for history lovers and those who enjoy a rollicking good spy adventure. I thoroughly enjoyed it and am looking forward to more from the talented woman behind the tale!
My review copy was provided by the author; this provision in no way shaped my review.
Full review: http://blog.jill-elizabeth.com/2017/09/14/book-review-the-brass-compass-by-ellen-butler/#more-4479