A review by justabean_reads
A Cool and Lonely Courage: The Untold Story of Sister Spies in Occupied France by Susan Ottaway

adventurous dark informative medium-paced

3.0

Pop history about a pair of French-British sisters who worked for the SOE during WWII. The prose was pretty basic, and I'd be interested in a paper copy to see what the citations were like, but I found the story itself very engaging. There were a lot of details about the daily life and challenges of the agents, how the cells were put together, and the many and varied cock ups of the command structure. (Though the author tended to get sidetracked by minutia, like the names of the RAF pilots on every single flight.) There was a little "she must have felt" style narration, but it wasn't too bad.

Later sections of the book got pretty grim with torture and concentration camps.

I'm interested on different takes on the SOE, but haven't really made a project of it. I get the feeling that opinions on several key figures are divided, to say the least.