Three ordinary girls The remarkable story of three Dutch teenagers who became spies, saboteurs, Nazi assassins--and WWII heroes

Brady has explored little-known aspects of World War II, from the life of Ted Roosevelt Jr. (His Father's Son, 2017) to the story of a civilian freighter that aided in a critical Moroccan invasion (Twelve Desperate Miles, 2012). Now he turns his attention to the Netherlands, highlighting three young women who worked for the Dutch resistance. While Anne Frank hid nearby, teenage sisters Truus and Freddie Overgesteen joined the fight after being raised in a leftist home. Johanna Schaft, known as Hannie, came to the group after being forced out of college by Nazi regulations. The women trained as fighters, learning hand-to-hand combat and practicing their shooting. Their missions were often based on their ability to infiltrate male spaces by taking advantage of soldiers' assumptions about femininity: that the girls were naive, stupid, and innocent when they were anything but. Relying heavily on Truus' own observations, as well as previous works about Hannie's life, this book will please Brady's fans as well as those who are interested in new and different stories of WWII.

Historian Brady (Twelve Desperate Miles) delivers a dramatic group portrait of three teenage girls who fought in the Dutch resistance movement during WWII. Truus Oversteegen and her younger sister, Freddie, were born into a family active in leftist political circles in Haarlem, and after the German military overwhelmed Dutch defenses in 1940, the sisters, who were 17 and 15 years old, distributed copies of an anti-Nazi magazine and helped sabotage a speech by the head of the Dutch Nazi party. Eventually, they joined a resistance cell and met fellow teenager Hannie Schaft, who became known to the Gestapo as "The Girl with the Red Hair." The trio took part in missions to save Jewish children from deportation, smuggle weapons, gather intelligence, destroy public infrastructure used by the Germans, and assassinate Dutch Nazis. Brady conveys the inhumanity of the period with precision, describing in one instance how Truus had to dispose of the corpse of an elderly Jewish woman who had gone into hiding at the home of fellow resistance members. This moving story spotlights the extraordinary heroism of everyday people during the war and the Holocaust. Agent: Farley Chase, Chase Literary. (Feb.)