The Flowers of Evil - The Alice Network

Les Fleurs - colored
Zentangle

How do women find their voices in times of war? For Eve Gardiner, one of the main characters of Kate Quinn's The Alice Network, it was to become a spy. In 1915, there weren't many opportunities for women to serve except perhaps to become a nurse. Eve suffers from a stutter and many believed that was a sign of lower intelligence so the best she could manage was to be a clerk/typist in a government office. However, she had an excellent command of the French and German languages and because of that and her stutter (what better cover) she was pluck out of the obscurity of the typing pool, trained in the ways of espionage (what the pencil pushers thought would be useful), and sent to France to join the other women of the Alice Network - all of them with floral code names. For Eve, like many in this occupation not all went well for her during the war.

Skip forward to 1947 and meet the other major character of the novel - Charlie St. Clair, a college sophomore with a "Little Problem."  Charlie's older brother came back from the Pacific Theater missing one of his legs and reeling from what today we call PTSD. He couldn't deal and sought relief in committing suicide. Charlie's family like many who have had a suicide in the family (like mine) didn't handle the aftermath well. Charlie dealt with her grief by becoming promiscuous, and hence the development of the "Little Problem." Charlie's family is wealthy and for the wealthy there have always been ways to take care of "Problems." Money could buy Charlie an Appointment in a Swiss clinic and the Problem would be solved.

Charlie has another problem - during the war her French cousin, Rose, disappeared and she is desperate to find her. Charlie has been searching for answers and has managed to secure the name of Eve Gardiner as a contact who might be able to help with finding Rose. So on her way to the Appointment, she slips away from her mother and goes to find Eve.

In 1947, Eve is a broken woman. Somehow Charlie manages to provoke her enough to begin the challenge of finding Rose. Here is where I will leave off the details and prevent any further spoilers for you. What's important is that both Eve and Charlie begin the process of recovery from their grief and guilt. Very often those who survive from a tragedy feel guilty for having done so, for leaving others behind, for not being able to help those they love. Grief then becomes crippling. Both these women were crippled by their grief and they had to learn how to voice it and come to peace with it.
So do we. For myself, the grieving process took much longer than necessary because I hadn't been given the necessary tool to overcome it - the knowledge that it was okay to voice my grief. Suicide is still a huge stigma in our society so we don't talk about it. The only way to deal properly with grief is to acknowledge it by talking it out. Charlie chose to find relief from her pain by having sex, Eve by drinking, me by overeating. It is by accepting our grief that we can begin to heal and live again.