Review: Calling Invisible Women

by Toree Ruiz

Calling Invisible Women.
Downtown Sheraton, Wednesday at 10:00 a.m.
Bring a Kleenex.

It’s amazing how a simple want ad in the newspaper like the one above can make a person feel less alone. This is the case for Clover, the protagonist of Jeanne Ray’s book Calling Invisible Women. In the book, Jeanne Ray focuses on an issue that countless women have struggled with: invisibility. Clover is a wife and mother in her fifties. In the morning, she makes breakfast for her doctor husband and 23-year-old son; in the evening, she waits for her husband to come home. She does so much for her family, but there’s a problem: they don’t see her. Clover has been invisible to them for years, but she doesn’t begin to realize this until one morning when she looks into the mirror to find her toothbrush floating and her head missing – a whole new level of invisible. Not a good way to start the day.

Review: Code Name Verity

by Toree Ruiz

“Careless talk costs lives,” and in this case spoilers, so no careless talk will come from this review.

Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity is a book of historical fiction, but it feels as real as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Wein’s two female protagonists take the reader deep inside World War II as they take on dangerous jobs that had been almost exclusive to men. Verity, a Special Operations Executive (SOE) spy, is captured in France when she makes a fatal mistake and—get this—is caught looking the wrong way when crossing the street. The one upside to this is that it shows Verity’s ability to make fun of herself: “I am in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.”