Rosalie Knecht

A Most Anticipated Book of 2018 atThe Huffington Post, Book Riot, Bustle, Autostraddle, and more.

Who Is Vera Kelly?

azliana aziz

this is banging. i don't know whether the pop art cover is a disservice or a genius decision.

the story of vera kelly by rosalie knecht is an antithesis of most of what we would expect from spy noir books. knecht's understanding of her character and all the research that went to the settings and background of the book deserves tremendous appreciation.

i love love how vera is written as bisexual. but only exclusively formed romantic attachment with women. this reminded me to villanelle from killing eve. i'm not gonna lie, i did think about her a lot while reading this and i feel like vera is villanelle without the psychopathic angle. even vera's origin story of how she realized that she was into girls were almost similar to villanelle's and both broke my heart a bit. 


extra cookies to how knecht informed us of how vera's childhood affected her current life as a spy and she deftly disclose her story without being showy at all. it was all up to us to relate and understand vera.
what really strike me after finishing was how grounded and fully realized everything were. really props to knecht for being able to brought such life to a turbulent era and still could inject empathy and knowledge for us who probably weren't even aware of this piece of history. 

also yes, you can tell this is written by a woman because no hypersexualized aspect at all in this. sex exists but you don't have to be graphic and gratitutous for the sake of it. 


p/s: i was hoping this could be a series *nudge* *nudge*

Suzanne

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
I expected the book to start in NYC, because the summary says so, but the book actually jumps back and forth between Vera's teenage years up to her NYC move and the "newer" (1965/1966) time line.
Vera is in Argentina for the CIA trying to sniff out communists.
I loved Vera as a protagonist, and was very disheartened by the reality of a lesbian woman in the 60s who could be fired just for loving who she loved. I know it's still not the case everywhere in the world and that is so so sad.
I would recommend this to anyone who loves a good spy-novel. During this unending epidemic, it's so lovely to be able to travel through books.
It's a historical novel, though I am not familiar with Argentina in that time, so I can't say if it's accurate but from what I googled it seemed to be.
The book made me want to read the sequel straight away, which in a different way maybe was even better.

ARC was provided by NetGalley

Who Is Vera Kelly?

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