After all the tragedy, with Rose, Violette, Lilli, Daisy the Fleur du Mal, flowers who flourish in evil,
Finally the fields of Grasse, ( I knew nothing about ) but could almost smell the sweet scents wafting in the breezes, and after the horrors of these wars, this looks like paradise to me
I agree. A reviewer on Amazon wrote that the pining seemed more appropriate for a lost lover, rather than a cousin / childhood companion. Maybe it would have meant more if we’d gotten to know Rose, but she’s just a spectre with little backstory beyond their left-behind afternoon at the café.
I’m not convinced the author wrote these characters with any layers, but if she did, one could argue that Charlie is fooling herself. She may claim that she desperately wants to find Rose, but that’s just a psychological smokescreen – what she really wants is out of her current life, and the search for Rose is one way to escape.
Gorgeous photos, @jerseysouthmomchess. It does look like a place that would be hard to say good-bye to!
Ouch, @ignatius , hard on poor Charlie,
As @Mathmom pointed out, the effects of Charlie’s brother’s suicide ( and guilt) left her broken and searching ( sadly at Bennington in the arms of frat boys)
Becoming pregnant, and numb to life, she sought refuge in her happy time with her beloved cousin.
Escapism from her reality- but, I do agree, Quinn employed those hallucinations, too often.
What Quinn did very well, was contrast two unmarried pregnant women, different eras, facing the hard choice.
Did anyone think Eve should not have had an abortion?
I wonder if the abortion that Eve had also made her sterile, as she didn’t mention any other pregnancies.
I think it would have been very hard to bear the child of someone who made your flesh crawl. I do wish she hadn’t gone back after she knew that Lili had been captured. So much needless pain and torture.
I actually agree with @mathmom. A close friend lost her father unexpectedly and fell apart afterwards, in much the same way Charlie does. I understand it because I’ve seen it. However, like @buenavista, the “endless Rose reveries” and references to the “the Little Problem” began to wear on me. I just didn’t need what I felt was the almost constant repetition.
The Eve storyline was definitely better than the Charlie story line, but Charlie’s quest for Rose didn’t bother me. She was looking for happier times. I thought Charlie did a good job explaining to Quinn how she was numb and searching for anything that might help her feel something after her brother died. Her search gave her a pregnancy and a continued numbness. I like the way the author showed how the war affected the different characters, both during the war and after.
I liked the way Lili was depicted. She really jumped off the page – a tiny woman, larger than life (in a morally questionable hat).
She (Louise de Bettignies) was a historical character, as was Leonie van Houtte – code name Charlotte Lameron. (Says the author: “changed to Violette Lameron, as I already had a Charlotte” – which made me scratch my head and wonder why she didn’t use a different name for fictional Charlotte and keep historical Lameron’s first name 
)
Here’s a woman spy who wasn’t in the book, but wow! If I had read a novel with this plot line, I would have tossed it aside as unbelievable: Amy Elizabeth Thorpe - Wikipedia
One quote stood out as sounding very much like Eve: Pack is reported to have later said about her sexually-active war years:
Ashamed? Not in the least, my superiors told me that the results of my work saved thousands of British and American lives… It involved me in situations from which ‘respectable’ women draw back – but mine was total commitment. Wars are not won by respectable methods.
I know, right??? – I read the comment about the author changing van Houtte’s name to Violette and thought the same thing re: why didn’t she change Charlie’s name! But…changing the name to Violette kept the “flower” motif of Lili, Violette, and Marguerite (Daisy). So maybe that was also part of the reason?
Oh yes, good point! I bet that was it. (It figures that a Rose would pick up on that 
)
You are so right, what a jaw dropping list of sexual liaisons, but with heroic results.
From your link…
“ . Her method was sexual and romantic seduction of high-level foreign diplomats.[1] She successfully obtained some intelligence on the German Enigma machinesand the Black Chamber in Poland, obtained the cipher books of fascist Italy, and stole the Vichy French naval codes out of a locked safe within an embassy. In an article published two months before her death she wrote, “…in the dangerous years of Nazi aggression I looked upon myself as a soldier serving my country. No sacrifice was too great for the soldiers. I felt that, in my own way, I could do no less than they.”[2]
Her Time magazine obituary quoted William Stephenson, head of the BSC, saying that she was “the greatest unsung heroine of the war.”[3][4] The full story of her World War II activities cannot yet be known because some official archives as of 2016 were still “closed indefinitely” or "heavily redacte”
I thought the exact same thing.
The bios of female spies don’t sound boring at all, but I guess they don’t include the long hours/days/months of watching, waiting and listening.
I would have made an absolutely awful spy. I’m a terrible liar who doesn’t like deprivation and would fold in a second under torture. The lives these women led are almost unimaginable to me.
The penny just dropped after reading @jerseysouthmomchess’s post: Bennington did not become coed until 1969 and even now does not have fraternities. The closest college is Williams, at 14 miles away, which seems a bit distant for constant, er fraternization, in those days.
ETA tell me your book club is on CC without saying your book club is on CC
I started code name verity right after I finished this, and the first character was a female captured spy in WW2 who was open about withholding nothing from the nazi’s, the exact opposite.
Good catch, @stradmom ! The book mentions that girls at Bennington were there “to hang around Ivy League boys and find a husband,” so the boys could have come from one of those, but that doesn’t work, either, since there are no Ivy League schools within a couple of hours.
Similar to books and movies set in the present day that talk about a “scholarship to Harvard/Princeton”. Nope.
I just realized that the missing Rose also has a flower name!
Here’s a nice link to three of Baudelaire’s poems Excerpt, Baudelaire, Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du mal I like this translation. He was prosecuted for the themes of death and sex, but just had to pay a fine and remove some of the poems which were later published separately.
I know there is a lot of guess work and extra characters needed when writing a historical novel. But I actually prefer it when the facts are kept true.
Last year I enjoyed a “The Engineer’s Wife” about building of the Brooklyn Bridge. But the implied affair with PT Barnum circus owner was an addition I did not need. This reviewer agreed
