Author: Jenny O’Brien
The Resistance Knitting Club, part of the Threads of Resistance series, is the first book in the series, written by Jenny O’Brien, and it was an amazing book to read. I already put it on my calendar that the second book in this series is coming to the US Kindle on the 4th of August.
The Resistance Knitting Club is a WWII historical fiction novel inspired by true stories of women who used knitting patterns to encode intelligence during WWII. As I wrote in my blog about another book on a similar topic (The Secret Sewing Society), the UK’s National Archives has images of women’s dresses carrying hidden messages in Morse code.
This remarkable novel moves between Guernsey in 2010 and Paris in 1941. An elderly woman in 2010 suffered from a stroke and suddenly spoke fluent French, surprising her family, who had no idea she could speak the language. The woman is Leonora (Lenny) Gallienne, who, at 18 years old, joined Churchill’s secret army after her brother was declared missing at Dunkirk. She goes through rigorous training in England and Scotland, and then goes to Paris, where she works undercover in a bookshop while encoding intelligence into knitting patterns. After this initial story from 2010, the book mainly follows Lenny’s training and then undercover work in Paris, only to return to 2010 towards the end of the book.
The novel is about ordinary domestic skills that became politically meaningful. Knitting, associated with women’s domestic labor, becomes a method of espionage, and to the credit of the British men, they recognized it and credited women for this skill. But, as with all war history, everything is always about battles and men who fought and tragically lost their lives; we rarely hear about women’s war effort, which is nicely narrated in this historical fiction. Lenny’s stitches are both decorative and practical and become messages, codes, and acts of resistance. She also teaches men spies to knit, which was written in a really funny way. The novel connects women’s craft, wartime service, secrecy, and historical memory. The dual storyline also presents the 1941 story as one of war, danger, identity, and courage, while the 2010 story is about memory and silence. The novel thus asks not only what women did during the war, but also why so many of these stories are hidden or misunderstood.
The Resistance Knitting Club belongs to fiction exploring women’s roles in war efforts that do not always fit the conventional image of a soldier. I also like the communicative aspect of knitting because women’s knitting work is a form of communication. The war also does not end when fighting stops because there are secrets, traumas, language, and memory.
I absolutely loved this nicely written book, and look forward to the continuation of the series.
Thank you for reading!