Review: Thought Provoking Action
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 12, 2012
Gabriela Reyes has lost her family. She knows her father alone might still be alive, but she doesn't know where he is or how to find him in Occupied France. She's starving and running out of options.Until a chance encounter with Christine, a French woman who is surviving The Occupation by catering to German officers, offers Gaby a way out. Gaby is willing to wash dishes for the food left-over on the plate, but she is not willing to resort to entertaining the hated Germans... Until she sees the man who took her father. She will do anything to find her father - even pose as a collaborator. But she is only posing, and not all the Germans are what they seem to be.Any book about collaborators in WWWII France is difficult to read at times. Surviving was not only difficult, but nearly impossible for many. The reasons for collaboration were never as cut-and-dried as a person being evil or weak. So it was for the characters in The Red Rooster. And Wallace does not stint at showing the emotional toll on the psyche of those who collaborated - the end is particularly poignant for some of the characters. I only wish that there had been an update on them after the war ended.Wallace's writing is very well done, his descriptions are thorough without being overly wordy, and I think he excels at showing rather than telling readers the nuances of the story. While my inclination would be to dismiss French collaborators as terrible, The Red Rooster shows a story behind the actions without being apologetic.