{"id":4566,"date":"2022-09-16T08:10:46","date_gmt":"2022-09-16T15:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4566"},"modified":"2022-09-16T08:10:46","modified_gmt":"2022-09-16T15:10:46","slug":"susan-elia-macneal-mother-daughter-traitor-spy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/susan-elia-macneal-mother-daughter-traitor-spy\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Elia MacNeal: Mother Daughter Traitor Spy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In her Maggie Hope series, Susan MacNeal has seemed to be more and more interested in the US side of the outbreak of WWII (see The Hollywood Spy, <\/em>2021). \u00a0In this novel, a standalone, she pursues that interest, creating a terrifying account of Nazism in America in 1940.\u00a0 Her central characters, mother and daughter Vi and Veronica, kick off the action with Veronica\u2019s graduation from Hunter College in New York.\u00a0 Veronica is looking forward to an internship at Mademoiselle<\/em> magazine, but thanks to an unfortunate turn of events the internship is rescinded. She and her mother, along with her Pasadena based Uncle Walter (in town for her graduation from Hunter) make plans to move to California.\u00a0 Uncle Walter is willing to let the women live in his beach house.<\/p>\n

Uprooted and beginning life in a very new place, Veronica begins by looking for a journalism job, with no luck.\u00a0 A woman in a diner overhears her talking with her mother and tells her to ask a friend of hers for a typing job.\u00a0 Intrepid, she heads out to check out this job, where she is hired by the friendly McDonnells and put right to work.\u00a0 However, by the end of her first workday, she realizes the McDonnells, nice as they may be, are Nazis. She and her mother turn first to the police, then the FBI, and then, as a last resort, to an old Navy contact of her father\u2019s.<\/p>\n

That gets the ball rolling. Vi is a Navy widow, so she\u2019s listened to and the women\u2019s account is referred to two men working undercover and mostly unappreciated in LA (at the time, Hoover was more worried about Communists).\u00a0 When the men hear Veronica\u2019s story, they ask if she will work undercover, using her journalism skills to observe and report back to them everything she hears in her work.\u00a0 Veronica agrees and it\u2019s not long before her mother, who is an embroidery whiz, gets noticed by a fashionable woman who wants not only to commission some work but to introduce Vi to her friends.<\/p>\n

The woman takes Vi to an \u201cAmerica First\u201d lunch. This group, organized by Charles Lindbergh, was very much an isolationist group, wanting to keep the US out of another foreign war so soon after the last one.\u00a0 While Vi herself is an isolationist, she\u2019s not an anti-Semite, and she\u2019s horrified by what she hears at the luncheon.\u00a0 It\u2019s not long before she, too, is working undercover.<\/p>\n

MacNeal does an excellent job of illustrating the strain and tension of living a life that\u2019s nothing like your own.\u00a0 Even though it\u2019s for a very good cause, Veronica becomes more and more uncomfortable as she gets close to and begins dating one of the young Nazis she meets at the social club the McDonnells take her to.\u00a0 Because she looks \u201cright\u201d \u2013 i.e. Aryan, blonde, blue eyed, with a German background, and because she sits in the background taking shorthand, she\u2019s pretty well overlooked.\u00a0 Not only is she sitting in meetings taking notes, she\u2019s learning all kinds of things from her boyfriend, and she\u2019s able to pass along quite a lot of information.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s truly unsettling about this book are the parallels to our present moment, with it\u2019s threat of violence from groups that want to listen to only one voice.\u00a0 At times it was difficult to read.\u00a0 Of course, MacNeal\u2019s story, set in 1940 and heading to 1941, is going to end in a decisive manner with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.\u00a0 The very human cost of the undercover work done by Veronica, Vi and their team is beautifully illuminated by MacNeal, who, as always, wears her writer\u2019s heart on her sleeve.\u00a0 Heartbreaking and ultimately redemptive, the reader knows Veronica and Vi still have much to live through, but they\u2019ve really done their part.\u00a0 This is a fascinating backstage look at history.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her Maggie Hope series, Susan MacNeal has seemed to be more and more interested in the US side of the outbreak of WWII (see The Hollywood Spy, 2021). \u00a0In this novel, a standalone, she pursues that interest, creating a terrifying account of Nazism in America in 1940.\u00a0 Her central characters, mother and daughter Vi … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[921,919,374,10,907,922,42,920,149],"class_list":["post-4566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-1940-california","tag-bantam","tag-espionage","tag-historical","tag-los-angeles","tag-mother-daughter-traitor-spy","tag-susan-elia-macneal","tag-undercover-work","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4566"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4579,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions\/4579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}