Sisters of the Storm
In November 1943, not long after the Italian surrender to the Allies in WW2, an American transport plane carrying a US army medical team went astray en route to southern Italy and crash-landed in German-occupied Albania. With the help of the Communist partisans, the 26 personnel, including several nurses, evaded capture and marched across the snowbound mountains for 63 days to reach the sea and rescue. Sisters of the Storm is a fictionalised account of this true-life journey.
Most of the characters in the book are fictional, including the two central characters, twin sisters Nicole and Andrea, both US army nurses. For both, this is a journey of self-discovery as well as a forced march. The story of the march is thus interleaved with flashbacks to their childhood and their respective marriages, giving us a double romance inside a thriller.
Perhaps because I am a man or because I know that part of Albania, I prefer the thriller to the romance. The dangerous and wearisome journey is well told, while the romantic element is rather overblown. Both women seem emotionally fragile and very ‘needy’ – no wonder they have difficult marriages. Also, the sudden appearance of Nicole’s childhood sweetheart among the partisans strains credibility.
Nonetheless, this is a good wartime adventure story about a very little-known theatre of war. It would have been helpful to have had a map and perhaps a little more background about the politics of wartime Albania (why were there two partisan groups on opposite sides?) and its ethnic and religious mix. But then the stranded Americans did not understand any of this, and yet they survived.
