Book Review: The Diamond Eye
The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn (William Morrow, 2022)
Kate Quinn’s The Diamond Eye is a novel based on the life of Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who tallied 309 kills during World War II. We first meet Mila as a 21-year-old mother studying to be a historian and trying to protect her young son from the selfish, inconsiderate father who drifts in and out of their lives. But war is about to be declared, and Mila, who has also studied to become a skilled markswoman, volunteers her services at the front, if only to help ensure that her beloved son will have a Nazi-free world in which to grow up.
Quinn has a great gift for suspense, sustaining the tension of her story through more than 400 pages. There’s plenty of tension to be had, as Mila takes us through every gritty, gory (and I do mean gory) detail of a sniper’s life and work, as well as dealing with what it means to be a woman trying to lead a squadron and command the respect of her men, and even unexpectedly falling in love with a jovial lieutenant. She’s a complex and fascinating heroine, warm by nature but able to turn ice-cold at a moment’s notice, because lives depend on her ability to do so. Even when her government sends her to Washington, D.C., to appeal for U.S. aid, a mysterious marksman stalks her from the shadows, for reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand.
I found myself a little puzzled by some of the mistakes made by the man hunting Mila. While I can honestly say that I have zero experience as an assassin, it seemed to me that a man who did have experience in that area should know to be much more careful than this character was. But most of his blunders are put down to his refusal to take seriously the idea that a woman could be a skilled sniper (an elementary mistake in itself—even in the pre-Google era, you’d think he could have found some way to do his homework). Like most women, I do have experience not being taken seriously, so I can buy that reasoning.
At any rate, Mila, with death and destruction all around her—including the deaths of some of those closest to her—somehow manages to maintain her deadly accuracy, her sense of purpose, and even her sense of humor. (Her description of D.C. receptions featuring “glasses of ubiquitous warm white wine like perfumed goat pee” stuck with me.) Of course her whole story is currently suffused with unintentional irony, as we watch a Ukranian-Russian woman struggle to prevent Germany from doing to Russia what Russia is currently doing to Ukraine. Life is weird like that. But despite the coincidental timing of this novel’s release, Mila comes across as a timeless heroine, one whose story would have something to offer at any moment.
(Cover image copyright William Morrow)
Book Links:
The Diamond Eye on Amazon
The Diamond Eye on Bookshop
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Over at Dickensblog, I reviewed The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally and D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber.