Hmm ... am feeling ambivalent about The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, by Simon Mawer, which I read in audio format. It started well ... when Marian Sutro, half French, half British, brought up in Geneva and fluent in French, is recruited by SOE to go undercover in occupied France, she suddenly feels that her life has finally got some purpose. She goes through intense training, learning about sabotage, and how to kill someone up close and personal. She meets fellow recruits Yvette and Benoit - the former, a vulnerable French women who just wants to "go back home"; the latter, a cocky French man, who takes a shine to Marian and with whom she decides to have a one night stand prior to them being shipped out. However, Marian has been holding a candle for an old family friend and scientist, Clement Pelletier, who she fell in love with when she was still at school. Clement, it turns out, is of special interest to the British, who hope to extricate him from France to help the allies create a nuclear bomb in order to "bring the war to an end faster" - and Marian is told that she may well be asked to help with his extraction! Marian is finally parachuted into South West France and settles into her work with the French Resistance, feeling useful and safe, and hooking up with Benoit from time to time. She is then sent to Paris for two reasons ... to make contact with Clement and persuade him to escape to Britain, and also to try and make contact with Yvette, whose own Resistance Group have been uncovered. Paris is a dangerous place and she finds it difficult to be aloof in the presence of Clement, who is now married. Things, inevitably get complicated! I was enjoying this book, the recruitment phase and then the training, but I became a bit disenchanted as it progressed once our heroine actually got to France - which is when I thought the action would really go up a level. However, Marian seemed to become a weaker character from that point on and I stopped warming to her and just wanted to shake her! Don't get me wrong, there ARE patches of real tension, with danger lurking around every corner, and there is a really threatening undertone in Paris, where no one is able to feel safe. But as the threat got bigger, Marian seemed to get smaller ... it was as if all that training was totally wasted! It may be that I was overly influenced by the narration of the audio version I read, but I felt the book kind of fizzled out right at the end, and I was left a bit deflated and disappointed. But as always, that could just be me!
My STAR rating: THREE.
Length: 320 print pages.
Price I paid: £7.00.
Formats available: print; unabridged audio CD; unabridged audio download; ebook.
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