Undercover Assignment & A Spy

This was my most anticipated book of 2021 and it’s one of my favorite books of 2021. I am SO glad that at last everyone can run to this book. Daunis Fontaine navigates between her wealthy white family’s town and the Ojibwe reservation. At 18 she loves science, plays hockey, hangs out with her best friend, and has just decided to enroll in a local college instead of the planned university since her GrandMary recently became ill.

The feeling of being between places, never fully accepted, and unsure what her future holds becomes even more complicated when she witnesses a horrific crime. Wanting to help her Ojibwe community, she agrees to work undercover with the FBI. And that just comes with its own issues, and stirs up past family secrets.

Daunis is a thoughtful character who, while trying to navigate her own feelings, trauma, and path in life, puts herself on the line to help her community while understanding a history and culture that the FBI and outsiders don’t. There’s a story about family, belonging, trauma, finding your voice, violence toward Native women–and a few other things–that all roll into one story, carried by Daunis, who you’ll cheer for from beginning to end. There are books with characters who I forever carry with me and Daunis is one.

(TW addiction, overdoses/ murder suicide scene/ past child abuse, details/ sexual assault on page, not graphic or detailed)

If you read this book knowing nothing about it you’d think you’d read a great spy novel–you’d be right about only the great part because it’s nonfiction. It is a fascinating true story about a woman who beat all the odds to survive as a spy for decades. Ursula Ruth Kuczynski became a communist as a teenager, married young, and moved to Shanghai with her architect husband where she was recruited by Richard Sorge, a Soviet military intelligence officer. From there she had quite a life!

I could not stop listening to this story (the audiobook is narrated by the author, which I very much recommend), which is filled with fascinating information (the g-spot is named after German physician Ernst Gräfenberg) and people. At the center is Ursula “Agent Sonya.” She was always willing to risk everything for her undercover work and the communist cause, which she believed was the only way to truly defeat racism and Nazis (the whole Third Reich and the Soviet Union becoming allies was a surprise to her). She went back to transcribing secret messages hours after giving birth, clearly sought danger, and somehow managed to never be betrayed even when fellow agents were captured. If you like to read about deeply layered people and history, this is a must-read. “I may not be innocent, but I’m right.”

(TW mentions past suicide, brief details/ torture/ mentions dead baby/ WWII)