Book Review: The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn

The Diamond Eye

by Kate Quinn (Quinn)

 

Snipers are assumed to be cold, hard, calculating loners, or so one would imagine regarding the top Russian sharpshooter during World War II. But in reality, one of the best Russian sharpshooters was a pretty but nerdy university history student named Lyudmila (Mila) Pavlichenko. Many did not believe that the small woman with a young son at home could possibly have an official kill count of 309. But she was often underestimated.

 

At the beginning of the book Mila is a young mother, working on her dissertations about Bogdan Khmelnitsky and the Ukraine’s accession to Russia, studying to get her university degree and divorce her boastful cheating husband. Mila enlists the same day war is declared in Russia and works her way from ditch digger, through the ranks, to a sharpshooter leading her own platoon, instructing and training new Russian sharpshooters. She slowly earns respect working her way up a man’s world, being hospitalized for numerous injuries, but always wanting to quickly return to defend her land.

 

As with her other books about remarkable women in World War II, Quinn recounts the tale of “Lady Death” using much of the subject’s own accounts of the real people and places in her life. Quinn adds or combines characters when necessary to retell Mila’s incredible life story, and takes some liberties with the historical record if needed, she says, to serve the novel.

 

And of course Quinn has to add a little of her own spice to give the story an element of urgency. In The Diamond Eye, another sniper has been enlisted by unknown sources to take out President Roosevelt and frame Mila for his death. We are privy to his dark plan to kill the president and use Mila’s people against her, all of which is purely fictional.

 

I greatly enjoyed The Diamond Eye, just as I did The Rose Code. We feel the apprehension, the fear, the pain, the grief, the humor, the love, and the anger that motivated Mila and made her more than just a pretty-faced Russian spokesperson, one who was able to win the friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt. I enjoyed how most chapters began with the official statement about an event from Mila’s memoirs and is followed by her unofficial version. If you are a fan of World War II fiction, you are going to love The Diamond Eye.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Huntress and The Rose Code by Kate Quinn or Three Sisters by Heather Morris.)

 

( official The Diamond Eye page on the official Kate Quinn web site )

 

Recommended by Cindy K.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

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