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The Girl in the Blue Beret
Bobbie Ann Mason
#UE7912 Hardcover, 352 pages; 2011 $26.00
Members' Price: $22.10

  Through Bobbie Ann Mason's novel The Girl in the Blue Beret, the reader becomes a part of the lives of the Belgian and French Resistance members who risk their own lives to rescue a downed American pilot. (The story is based on the life of the author's late father-in-law, Barney Rawlings (1920-2004), whose plane was shot down in occupied Europe during World War II.) Courageous Resistance members lead the pilot to an escape and evasion network that help him cross the Pyrenees to safety in neutral Spain. The main character in the story returns decades later to find the brave people who helped him, hoping especially to locate the young girl who sat on a park bench in Paris wearing a blue beret. It was she who initially put him in contact with the network that saved his life. The author interviewed Resistance members who helped her father-in-law and brings their historical perspective to the fictionalized account.

A Reader Review by Annie Laura Smith of Huntsville, Alabama