It’s the height of World War II and Captain Linc Takelnaught is assigned to take over a special operations team tasked with rooting out German covert agents within the U.S. Army. The key member of his team is an 18-year-old girl, Salty Jackdaw, whose skills are so far beyond normal human abilities that there is a perception about her bordering on the mystical. There are rumors of her being the … reincarnation of Joan of Arc. Others question who or what she really is.
Linc doesn’t believe the hype. But the longer he spends time with Salty, the more impressed he becomes. He’s conflicted over trying to reconcile her dedication and skillset with her seemingly sociopathic, violent tendencies, which is in direct contradiction to her moments of shyness, empathy, and tenderness. Things get complicated when Linc develops feelings for her that a commanding officer shouldn’t be developing for someone under his command.
Linc presses those in the know for information about Salty but no one’s talking. Linc just can’t let it go and his obsession consumes him to where he not only jeopardizes the team’s mission, but also puts at risk the lives of the team members, including Salty and himself, all the while trying to root out a dangerous enemy within their own ranks.
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Other than the American Civil War, probably no other war has spawned so many alternate-history and fantasy novels as World War Two. It lends itself to that kind of thing — it has the scope and stakes that many of our other modern conflicts have lacked, and enough weird things happened during it for real that it’s not hard for an author to come up with even weirder things to stick into the historical narrative.
The setup for this novel certainly tends toward the strange. It focuses (for the most part) on a squad of U.S. soldiers attached to the OSS working their way across 1943 Italy in search of spies and traitors in the U.S. Army. It tends to go through commanding officers at an accelerated pace; the current one, Captain Lincon Takelnaught, comes from a long line of ill-fated soldiers, but has enough sense to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut (for the most part). His troops go by the names of classic philosophers except for one: an 18-year-old woman named Salty, who’s a talented sniper and a fine singer (both skills get a workout). Their OSS contact’s a dead ringer for Veronica Lake. And by the way… they’re getting support from a shadowy government organization called OAVUM that has at its command some truly out-of-this-world technology.
The narrative follows Linc as he comes to terms with the exceedingly odd situations he and the squad get into. He has the kinds of reactions you might expect someone who is Regular Army having when presented with a very-not-Regular Army command, mission, and equipage. He’s smart enough to figure out how not to get offed by either the Germans or his own troops. However, when he finds himself being drawn to Salty, he doesn’t know what to do with his feelings or whether to trust himself. The author handles this situation well, even if Linc doesn’t.
Salty needs to be an enigma to make this work, and for the most part she remains that way. Given that women were active in the various European resistance movements and fought on the front lines for the Soviet Army (including as effective snipers) and Soviet Air Force, it’s not as much a leap as you might think to have her in the squad, even if the Americans didn’t do that sort of thing back then. In the story world, she’s become something of a legend on the front lines. Many of the troops the squad runs across regard Salty with something approaching reverence. There are a lot of Joan of Arc references, both explicit and implicit. The suspension of disbelief you’ll have to make here is not that she exists, but that she can be so well known and still avoid being pitched out of the Army.
In other stories, having alien-ish tech would mean changing the course of history: ending the war years early, or flipping the win to the Axis column. That’s not the case here. The OAVUM boys seem to be using the Italian campaign as a testing ground rather than trying to swing the outcome. So, craft that look suspiciously like old-school flying saucers vaporize the occasional German tank; Linc’s squad uses radios that are essentially primordial cell phones; and Veronica gets around in helicopters, which existed in 1943 in hen’s-teeth numbers. The author doesn’t portray the impact these toys have on the people around Linc’s squad (Linc comes to accept them perhaps too readily), which I’d expect would be significant as they saw Buck Rogers tropes come to life in front of them.
The prose and dialog is highly stylized and very distinctive; it took a while for me to get used to it. Long, complex sentences, off-center descriptions, chewy vocabulary, dialog that would come off as stilted in any other context: it somehow all works. In a way, the theatricality fits the narrative better than more run-of-the-mill writing would. It’s an artificial world, and naturalistic language would seem unsuited to it. Still, YMMV.
While the novel is set in WWII, it’s not about this war in particular or war in general. It’s more a rumination on identity, obsession, and image, during which things sometimes blow up. If you come into this looking for an action thriller or a SF twist on Saving Private Ryan, you’re going to be disappointed if not entirely confused.
The author gave me a copy and asked for a review, which I normally don’t do. In this case, the setup sounded just oddball enough to tickle the part of me that likes books that are boxes full of crazy (such as Beat the Reaper). This one didn’t reach that level of madness. The stylistic bravado, deadpan humor, and cockeyed handling of a familiar setting does, however, make me want to check out the author’s other two books, which sound like they’ve been fully cut loose from any recognizable reality. If we could give fractional stars, I’d give this one around 3.75, which I don’t mind rounding up to four just for the sheer confidence it exudes.
World War Girl Soldier is an odd duck: a literary genre novel; a fantasia about the psychic costs of both the attraction to mystery and the solving of that mystery; a quest story with 1940s Men in Black and UFOs. The highly distinctive style will either repel you or suck you in, but you won’t come away ambivalent about it (be sure to read the sample). Don’t come at this book expecting anything normal and you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find.