Publisher's Weekly Review
In this intriguing and carefully documented account, Rhodes College history professor Jackson (Paris Under Water) documents the "artistic acts of psychological warfare" committed by French artists Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe on the British Channel island of Jersey during WWII. Friends since childhood, Schwob and Malherbe fell in love when they were teenagers and moved to Paris in the 1920s, where they swirled in the same bohemian circles as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and André Breton. In 1937, the women, posing as sisters, moved to Jersey to "find quiet," only to see it fall to the Germans in 1940. Their acts of resistance included scrawling graffiti on buildings and leaving notes snuck into soldier's pockets and in between the pages of newsstand magazines. The messages, including photomontages, summaries of BBC news reports, and literary parodies "focused on fomenting resentment against the war and the German leadership," Jackson writes. Discovered and arrested in July 1944, Schwob and Malherbe attempted suicide and spent months imprisoned before being sentenced to death. They inspired other prisoners through the notes they continued to pass, and were eventually released in May 1945. Expertly mining the couple's own "postwar reminisces," Jackson enriches his account with colorful details such as the time they smuggled a cat through customs in a Hermès bag. Readers will delight in this unique and well-crafted story of wartime resistance. (Nov.)
Kirkus Review
The story of two women artists who courageously resisted Nazi occupation of a small island. Historian Jackson offers a fresh look at World War II resistance through the lives of Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, lovers who lived on Jersey, part of the Channel Islands, throughout the Nazi occupation. The daughters of wealthy families in Nantes, the two had fallen in love when they were teenagers, thrived among the avant-garde in Paris in the 1920s and '30s, and moved to Jersey in 1937 to escape rising oppression and anti-Semitism--Lucy had Jewish heritage--in the French capital. As artists, Lucy took the moniker Claude Cahun and Suzanne, Marcel Moore, with which they signed their creative work: photographs, collages, drawings. "By choosing new identities but also keeping their given names, Lucy and Suzanne remained somewhere between masculine and feminine," Jackson observes, "resisting either category fully and enjoying the freedom to float between the two when it suited them." In Jersey, the women were determined to demoralize the occupiers, leaving notes, cartoons, and illustrations throughout the island where soldiers could find them. "Each message," writes the author, "tried to convince soldiers to lay down weapons, desert, and go home." With increasing German paranoia about spies and subterfuge, avoiding suspicion was difficult; but it was not until late in the war that the women were arrested, interrogated, tried, and sentenced to death--a sentence successfully appealed. They were released after Germany's surrender. For Lucy, who suffered many physical and mental debilities, the war "was the one moment in her life when she seemed to have the strongest sense of purpose and the most direct vision about who she wanted to be." Drawing on archival and genealogical sources, the women's own writings, and histories of the period, Jackson creates a vivid picture of the tense, fearsome atmosphere of Jersey under Nazi occupation and the perils of resistance. A unique WWII history and absorbing story of two bold, unconventional women. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe were two singular, if long unsung, figures of WWII--French artists, lesbians, subversive and unapologetically empathetic to humanity. As gender-bending creatives in Paris, Schwob and Malherbe were known as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, respectively. As residents of the English Channel island of Jersey, they were a two-woman resistance movement against the Nazi occupation. The paper bullets of the title refer to insults against Hitler and the Nazis that they wrote on scraps of paper and ingeniously and secretly distributed around the island to lower the morale of German soldiers. It is a remarkable story of creative courage. Historian Jackson (Paris under Water, 2010) describes life on the island under German occupation and the women's elaborate resistance campaigns until the rueful day both were placed under arrest. Schwob and Malherbe's fierce intelligence is on full display during their court martial, which was a tour de force of cunning and truth telling, including moments of levity, as they parried every question, leaving their German interrogators angry and baffled, since they showed no regret for their actions nor pled for their lives. "Most political propaganda is designed to prevent people from thinking. Ours was designed to make them [the German soldiers] think," said Schwob. Exceptional and inspiring.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020
Library Journal Review
For fans of Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and LGBTQ+ history, here is a based-in-truth account of a pair of heroes who defied the Nazis and faced violence and death in their efforts to resist occupation. Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe were a romantic pair who had a colorful past that included spending time with some prominent figures of the 1920s Parisian art scene, which heavily influenced their later actions. In this fast-paced narrative, Jackson (history, Rhodes Coll.; Paris Under Water) focuses on the postwar writings of the people involved, as well as on official reports from Nazi authorities who dealt with them. While the first part deals in some amount of speculation on the author's part, piecing together stories of other subversive actors on the Channel Islands and those who knew the women, the latter half is rooted in primary documents and spotlights these unsung heroes of the Nazi resistance. Well-chosen photographs help place the women and their lives in context. VERDICT This is a satisfying contribution to World War II scholarship, highlighting a sophisticated, cultured, and still grassroots resistance effort. Recommended for public libraries.--Amanda Ray, Iowa City P.L.
