A review by bdw
A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Missing Agents of WWII. by Sarah Helm

3.0

I picked up this book with high hopes, but after reading it I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected. I was hoping for an in-depth biography of Vera Atkins, a woman who was very high up in the British spy organization SOE during the second world war. Instead, the book concentrates on the women she sent into France to spy during the war and her search to find them or discover their fates after the war. A good subject, definitely, but the author's failure to flesh out the women and her dry writing style made it hard to get through. Instead of really caring about them, I found myself reminding myself that they were real women and their fates were horrible, and that I *should* plow through the book for that reason alone.

The book did have some good points. The retelling of the women's experiences in concentration camps was horrendous and brutal. The end section discusses more of Vera's motivations and early life. I wonder why this wasn't put in the beginning, to give the reader more of a feel of who the woman was.