{"id":8948,"date":"2021-04-12T07:36:53","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T11:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8948"},"modified":"2021-04-13T19:22:54","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T23:22:54","slug":"the-rose-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8948","title":{"rendered":"The Rose Code"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Kate Quinn \u2013 Spies afoot in World War II, and not all of them are who you think! Most of the story of The Rose Code<\/em><\/a> takes place in December 1939, when three young women converge on Bletchley Park. They\u2019ve been recruited for ill-defined jobs and arrive in a mixture of youthful high spirits, enthusiasm, and uncertainty. Interspersed are chapters from, November 1947, which are a day-by-day countdown to the royal wedding of Prince Philip of Greece and Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, future Queen of England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most people today know the story of Bletchley Park (BP): how bright young things learned to decode messages generated by the German Enigma machines. Led by a collection of genius misfits and military leaders, an enormous decryption enterprise was quietly assembled. Quinn\u2019s detailed construction of that world is riveting, not just the technical hurdles overcome, but also the human interactions in that intense and desperate effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Osla Kendall\u2019s socialite mother hopes to stash her in Canada to wait out the war, but the sidelines are never a place for Osla, and she returns to London. She\u2019s a goddaughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten and, as it happens, the wartime girlfriend of Prince Philip. (Lest you think this is a fictional bridge too far, the character Osla is modeled on the real-life Osla Benning, \u201ca beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip\u2019s long-term wartime girlfriend,\u201d Quinn explains in an afterword.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mabel Churt has none of Osla\u2019s advantages, living in Shoreditch with her mum and younger sister, but she\u2019s bright and hard-working, and, like the many summoned to BP, she\u2019s meant to help the male \u201cbrains of the outfit\u201d with administrative and secretarial duties. That restriction doesn\u2019t last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mab and Osla are billeted in the spare bedroom of a Bletchley village house, where they meet the shy family daughter, Beth Finch. Beth is their age, but so totally cowed by her Bible-spouting mother, they feel obligated to bring her out of her shell. To her mother\u2019s chagrin, Beth lands a BP job, and she turns out to be the best code-breaker of them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work the women do is fascinating and deadly serious, yet the (mostly) young people they work with are full of life and humor. One by one, the coding systems of the Germans fall to the BP\u2019s round-the-clock efforts. From this vital but obscure corner of the war, you view its stuttering progress: Dunkirk, the bombing of London, the naval battle of Cape Matapan, the United States entering the war, the Germans\u2019 snarl in the Soviet Union, preparations for D-Day\u2014the innate excitement of the story propelling you past one wartime milestone after another. By constantly grounding her plot in real events, Quinn\u2019s narrative feels both believable and significant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the war, in the days leading up to the royal wedding, Osla and Mab receive a coded message from Beth. The friends have become estranged, unaware Beth is confined in a particularly horrifying mental institution. She hints at the existence of a Bletchley traitor who sold secrets to the Soviets and recalls their past friendship (\u2018You owe me.\u2019) Uneasily, Osla and Map reunite, and the hunt for the traitor is on. Without all the resources of BP, they must decipher the Rose Code<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a book that grabs your attention from the beginning and never lets go. I loved it!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kate Quinn \u2013 Spies afoot in World War II, and not all of them are who you think! Most of the story of The Rose Code takes place in December 1939, when three young women converge on Bletchley Park. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Rose Code - Did you know that most people working at Bletchley Park in WW II were women? Their role is finally getting attention. This thriller grabs you from page one and never lets go!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,193,126],"tags":[1788,1849],"class_list":["post-8948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-espionage","category-reading-2","tag-kate-quinn","tag-the-rose-code"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2kk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8948"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8950,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8948\/revisions\/8950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}