The Huntress

(Thank you, William Morrow and TLC Book Tours, for the free book to review. All opinions are my own.)

As a huge fan of Kate Quinn’s last novel, The Alice Network (read my review here), I was beyond excited to dig into her latest novel. The Huntress follows three main characters and the story alternates between their perspectives.

Nina was a Night Witch during the war – an all-women night bomber regime from the Soviet Union. After being shot down behind enemy lines, she barely escapes a deadly encounter with The Huntress. Ian Graham is a Nazi hunter who wants to find The Huntress and bring her to justice. Ian and Nina team up to hunt her down, and their mission takes them over seas to post-war Boston. There they meet Jordan, a seventeen-year-old aspiring photographer. Jordan is suspicious of the woman her dad has recently married, and feels there is something odd about her story of her past. When all three of these characters’ (along with Tony) worlds collide, they realize they’re all hunting the same woman – The Huntress.

One thing that attracted me to this story was yet another perspective I hadn’t heard before – that of the Night Witches. This, along with the Nina’s character, were by far my favorite part of the book. I loved Nina’s independence, fearlessness, and feistiness. She evolved into a character I really came to like. I loved how her past totally influenced her present guardedness and I would have loved a novel solely focused on her.

I honestly lost interest in Jordan’s part of the story. I found it very predictable. While I loved her relationship with her father, it wasn’t enough for me to get truly invested in her story. Sadly, I think her sections detracted from the overall story and so I continued to hope to get to the point where I wanted to read the rest of the story so much I couldn’t put the book down, but it never came. There were times I felt like it was work to read…and that made me so sad.

This was a long book…one that was just okay for me. I wanted to love it as much as The Alice Network, but something was just missing throughout for me. However, learning about the Night Witches and what an awesome (never-before-heard-of) aspect of WWII was worth the read to me!