What do readers think of D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose? Write your own review.

I enjoy reading about womens history. D-Day Girls was a fascinating topic. The story was well researched with many references to the author's sources. The story inspired me to learn more about the French Resistance and other events taking place during WWII.

I would have liked more information about the women's lives and their personal experiences while working covertly. I also felt the story jumped around a lot. It wasn't hard to follow, but it lacked continuity.

This is a very good addition to the WWII foundation. Many of us lived at that time and remember some of what occurred. In this book the contributions of women have been well described. I cheered at some of the anecdotes that Rose related. She is a good narrator and appears to have done her homework.

Rose's book definitely puts the individual efforts of the resistance up close and personal. The reader can't help but be impressed with the amount of research done and the skill it took to make it extremely readable (even humorous at times).
She presents a good combination of the womens' background, training and actual "boots on the ground" work.
While I didn't find this an absolute page turner of a book, it was definitely engrossing enough to keep me reading to see how each woman fared.

Rose's book was fascinating account of female courage, daring and organization. Her research was intensive and exhaustive, codes, aliases, operating covers, techniques used by these women. She provided a refreshing commentary about role of patriarchy, prejudice interacted, often hindered recruitment and greater use. The release SOE release of info in the late 1990's allowed new information to be revealed. Rose's perspective on the various political players, Churchill, De Gaulle and other players was thoughtful. These women were a small part of the Anglo-French effort. Wherever British troops were active, so were women as nurses. This is often overlooked it all warfare. One little fact that emerged was French women were only granted vote in 1946.

Sarah Rose puts her purpose boldly in her subtitle. Her well-researched profiles of six of the 30 female operatives the British Special Operations Executive sent to Occupied and Vichy France, as Resistance organizers, suppliers, saboteurs, makes a strong case for the significant role of the Resistance before and after D-Day, and especially for the significance of women as operatives—largely downplayed then ("girls" is how they were referred to), and for decades since.

That's a lot of ground to cover, in a history clearly written for a general audience, particularly women (like me) with only a sketchy understanding of WW2 military chronology. Rose supplies this essential context, weaving it into her efforts to trace each protagonist's background, her hiring (SOE's desperate experiment, due to the shortage of men), training and progress through the war. But the weaving is far from seamless: She attempts to tell the women's personal stories as though they were fiction— while sticking only to those (sketchy) details that she can document in painstaking chapter notes. That approach doesn't really bring the characters to life as individuals, and it interferes with the narrative flow and the reader's effort to piece together the larger picture.

Still, the events are gripping, especially as we learn each woman's fate (including torture, execution, indifferent "gratitude" for those who survived, only to battle for military recognition). I learned a lot from this book, and I believe we are all enriched by knowing that the Greatest Generation was more than a "band of brothers"— their sisters were every bit as selfless and courageous.

D-Day Girls is an intriguing narrative of several women of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) who were sent to France ahead of D-Day (originally scheduled for 1943) to disrupt the Nazis in France. Somewhat sketchily trained, they were to link up with the French Resistance and use any means to sabotage the Nazis—bombings, disrupt communications, and gather and transmit intelligence on German movements. Their story is fascinating, and several of the women's lives in the SOE are described in detail. It is clear that there were more women working in France than included in the book (the number 50 occurs frequently) and so this is a partial history, with references to other women and a good bibliography for further reading. Although I enjoyed the book, I was left wondering who the target audience was. I wanted more details of their training before they left England, more information about how they established themselves in France and worked with the Resistance, and how they were able to accomplish their incredible missions. In some ways, the lack of detail seemed a way to keep the book shorter, which made me think it was written for the YA audience, although it doesn't seem to have been marketed that way. Overall, I would recommend this to anyone interested in how the SOE operated in France.

As the participants in WWII are aging and dying,it is imperative that their narratives are told. This book is a well researched account of a part of that war that I knew little about, the recruitment of female spies who spoke fluent French. Since this an overview of five years of the history of espionage in France there was little in depth character development . However I was astonished and appreciative of the recounting of the deeds of these brave women (and men) that helped D-Day be a success.

No matter how much reading you have done over the years on WW2, there is always something new turning up. D-Day Girls is an account of three women active in the French resistance; their recruitment and training, their experiences ranging from romantic to brutal, and the recognition, or lack of, their immeasurable contribution to eventual victory. It is non-fiction but reads like a novel, not always a plus, because in the area of the participants' feelings and emotions, there is a lot that has to be attributed to the author's imagination. The prose style tilted from edgy into snark a few times. That said, it was meticulously researched, and the historical facts in this book cannot be questioned. It is a page turner, I would recommend it to all students of those war years. You will read it in just a few sessions, and end up in awe of these three women.