Madame Fourcade's Secret War by Lynn Olson

I heard about this book on the Parnassus Bookstore Friday video series, "It's New To You"--which if you haven't checked it out, you should. There is so much to know about authors and books, and this bookstore is a treasure, to be sure, and every week they highlight a handful of books, so even a voluminous reader like myself can be overwhelmed with the choices. This one highlights the work of women during WWII. The book is about one person, but there is some attention to what happened after France surrendered to Germany, in terms of having no organized resistance to begin with and how it organically grew ad what the barriers were, all of which I did not know and had not thought about. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, married, mother of two, slender, blond and barely in her 30s. Over the course of World War II, Fourcade built a network of agents across occupied France. They collected intelligence on the movements of German U-boats, on supply shipments sailing in and out of key ports, on which of the bridges into Paris were mined. They were frequently captured by Nazis (in Fourcade’s case, twice) and, in some cases, escaped (again, Fourcade’s record: 2-0). The book does have a bit too much of "this happened and then this happened" rather than straight ahead telling the story, but it is a book that highlights a forgotten woman of history, who while spying, also had a third child in 1943, and was altogether forgotten by history--but survived to see France restored.