The woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

American Virginia Hall was brought up to marry well and behave. Not likely.  A lover of adventure and great with languages, she aspired to a job in the state department in Europe.  An accident while on holiday in Turkey resulted in the loss of her leg below the knee and she soon found her career offers limited to secretarial positions.  But Europe was in the midst of WW11 and she was not going to safely sit at a desk and watch.  Refusing to accept any limitation from her prosthetic leg (who she names Cuthbert ), her language skills lead the British espionage agency to place her in France and eventually as an organizer for the resistance.  At some points this seemed a very journalistic impersonal telling of the events of the war when it was England alone against Nazi Germany.  When she is the center of the story, when it is her amazing story being examined, it reads much better.  Add it to Hidden Figures, The Woman who Smashed Codes and all the other stories now being told of the contributions that women have made and for some reason just never seem to be part of the bigger history we have learned.