The Diamond Eye
In the years before WWII, Ukrainian Mila Pavlichenko only takes a sharpshooting course to prove to her estranged husband that she can be both mother and father to their son Slavka. Her real ambition is to be a historian, but when the Germans invade and threaten Odessa, where she is trying to finish her dissertation, she enlists and has to fight to be taken seriously as a sniper.
Just over a year later, she finds herself at an international students’ conference in Washington organised by the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. As one of the Soviet Union’s most successful snipers, she has been given the task of campaigning for America to join the war in Europe, unaware that her every move is being watched by a marksman on a deadly mission of his own.
With war currently raging in Ukraine, this book feels strangely relevant. Based on a true story, it’s a novel of two halves seamlessly fitted together: a war story with its tales of hardship, loss, black humour, and unexpected love; and a political thriller with a predictably Hollywood ending. Personally, I think the book would have been more interesting without the slightly implausible thriller element.
Quinn has done an admirable job of putting flesh onto the bones of the real-life Mila’s memoirs. Maybe it’s because I’m East European by descent that it bothers me that I don’t think she quite captures exactly how repressive life would have been under Stalin’s Rule of Terror in the 1930s and 40s.
These minor niggles aside, this is a page-turning book that will appeal to anyone looking for an unusual angle from which to view WWII.
