The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff **** (of 4)

In June 1940 Winston Churchill ordered the creation of Special Operations Executive (SOE) for the purpose of sabotaging Nazi operations in occupied portions of France. Among SOE's operatives were Britain's first women in combat. The Lost Girls of Paris describes the wartime lives of some of these women from their first days as young recruits, through their training, and finally to their secret missions in occupied France. Violette Szabo, re-created in The Lost Girls of Paris as Marie, was a British citizen, who as a single mother of a toddler, agreed to parachute into France.

Violette Szabo recovering from an ankle injury suffered during parachute training, 1944. 

Marie, like Violette, operated a secret radio transmitter under the noses of the Nazis and assisted in blowing up a bridge that would have been vital to German forces responding to the imminent D-Day invasion. What Pam Jenoff does so well is capture the danger, tension, isolation, bravery, and nerve required to engage in sabotage knowing that a single false step would lead to interrogation, torture, and an extermination camp. Yes, there are impossible plot twists contrived to cross the paths of characters unlikely to have ever met in reality. If accurate history is what you are after, this is not a book for you. In, in contrast, you are searching for a suspenseful read about an under-reported contribution of real-life heroic women who contributed to the cause of derailing Nazi supremacy in Europe, The Lost Girls of Paris is a gripping introduction.