A Call to Service (Women of the Resistance, 2)
Early April 1941 is the worst time aristocratic Alix Malkovic could have chosen to return to her native Yugoslavia. Just as the first German bombings begin, she and her childhood friend Drago try to join her parents in Belgrade (where her Serbian father is advisor to the newly enthroned King Peter), only to find that the royal entourage have fled abroad. Alix throws herself into helping in any way she can, and soon she and Drago fall in with the entourage of Tito, the communist leader, who bides his time waiting for Soviet orders to start a resistance movement. Meanwhile Alix’s American not-quite-sweetheart Steve is attached to royalist (and fiercely anti-communist) Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic, while her English mother does intelligence work at the Balkan Desk in Cairo…
I confess I couldn’t warm to the characters, and the thin plot felt like a series of (not always convincing) excuses to place them where they could observe key historical developments. On the other hand, what they do observe offers a very interesting glimpse of the intricate politics and internecine strife in Yugoslavia around the German invasion, and the result is, I fear, rather stronger as history than as a novel.
