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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Dorothy Gilman
Genre : Fiction
This was a fun read! A widow in her 60s, Emily Pollifax, finds herself in perfect health and yet dissatisfied with her volunteer work wheeling the bookcart and working the gift shop at the hospital, rolling bandages, attending the garden club and art association meetings, and joining friends for afternoon teas. When the doctor suggests she look for more congenial outlets, she remembers when she was growing up, she wanted to become a spy. On the following morning, she leaves by train for Washington, D.C., visits her congressman, and two days later goes to the Central Intelligence Agency to offer her services, and asks to see Mr. Jasper Mason. Her adventure begins when she is mistaken for another agent and sent on assignment to Mexico.
“They stood and looked at the wooden cart full of hay rather stupidly, thought Mrs. Pollifax, until she realized that both Farrell and the Genie were exhausted and that as the senior member of the party—rather like a Scout leader, she thought with blurred and semi hysterical humor—she was going to have to assume command whether she was exhausted or not.”
“Around her the ground mist that only a few minutes ago had been gray and tattered was transformed by light into silky clouds of pear-white and palest pink. The river flowing around and past them contained in it mosaic patterns of sky and sun and shore. Mrs. Pollifax felt a stirring in her that was almost mystical, an exhilarating sense of freedom that she had never know before, as if in this moment all the rules and habits of a lifetime fell from her and she stood at the very core of life and felt its heartbeat. It came of experiencing dawn in this strange country a continent away from her own; it came of being still alive when she ought to have been dead; it was compounded of surprise, appreciation, exhaustion, hunger, the effects of danger, and an unquenchability of the human spirit.
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