Review: The Secret War of Julia Child

The Secret War of Julia Child by Diana R. Chambers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two and a half stars.

I loved Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and the recent TV series about Julia Childs so when I saw this fictionalised account of Julia's WW2 experience in the OSS and meeting Paul Childs I was eager to request an ARC from NetGalley.

Julia McWilliams was working as a Washington file clerk during WW2, in control of the File Registry for the head of the OSS "Wild Bill" Donovan. Eager to become an agent, successfully petitions/manoeuvres Donovan into letting her set up the File Registry in India, which leads her to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore, Burma, and China.

All I can express about this is disappointment. I feel like Diana Chambers has done a lot of research, reading biographies and autobiographies of many of the characters in this book, but then in the afterword she says Julia might have done X, or seen Y, or could have done Z - so the reader feels like basically all the interesting things are totally fictitious. Added to which this reads like a slightly superficial factual account, maybe an outline for a film, or a historical text written for a younger audience. So now I don't know how much (if anything) is real and how much is fiction, and if its fiction why is it so dry? The 'romance' between Julia and Paul is dreadful, he comes across as having a superiority complex and she comes across as desperate. Overall, this felt like it missed the mark on both fact and fiction, I didn't learn anything about Julia Childs' earlier life because I can't tell what the author made up, and the fiction wasn't enjoyable.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

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