Blogmas Day 11: The Darkest Hour by Caroline Tung Richmond #Bookreview

Title: The Darkest Hour
Author: Caroline Tung Richmond
Publisher:  Scholastic Press
Published Date: July 26th, 2016
Genre: Historical Fiction, YA, WWII
Page Count:307
Format: Paperback

My Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★.5

Goodreads Summary: 
Never underestimate a pretty face.

My name is Lucie Blaise.

I am sixteen years old.

I have many aliases, but I am none of the girls you see.

What I am is the newest agent of the CO-7.

And we are here to take down Hitler.

After the Nazis killed my brother on the North African front, I volunteered at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC, to do my part for the war effort. Only instead of a desk job at the OSS, I was tapped to join the Clandestine Operations -- a secret espionage and sabotage organization of girls. Six months ago, I was deployed to German-occupied France to gather intelligence and eliminate Nazi targets.

My current mission: Track down and interrogate a Nazi traitor about a weapon that threatens to wipe out all of Western Europe. Then find and dismantle the weapon before Hitler detonates it. But the deeper I infiltrate, the more danger I'm in. Because the fate of the free world hangs in the balance, and trusting the wrong person could cause millions of lives to be lost. Including my own.

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 My Review:

"My good Catholic mother taught me to never lie, cheat or steal.. I pray she can forgive me, then , for what I've agreed to do - for this sil will be far worse." 

Lucie Blaise is an undercover French-American who is working with the French resistance. She and several other women work as spies and infiltrate the Germans and the french forces in order to get helpful information. This means that are all in danger constantly and when things start to go wrong it gets bad really quick.
All of the women have family reasons for being there that we learn about throughout the book, and even though Lucie is the only one we get to see things from (besides letters from her brother Theo) you do get to know each of the girls and care for all of them.
Lucie, Sabine, and Tilly end up having to go on a most likely death mission in order to stop Hitler's new weapon that will take out everyone who's not German. This is when things got really intense at this point and multiple times I was really worried for the women.

"That's the lesson you learn quickly under Hitler's iron fist: You can't save everyone who deserves saving, so you do the next best thing - you take out the ones who don't."

Overall I really loved this book. I liked how Catholicism was actually mentioned in YA book for a change, that is next to impossible to find (I've been looking for it). The mystery of what the thing was that Hitler's men had created was terrifying and them trying to stop it, had me not wanting to put my book down so that I could find out if they would all be okay.

I would highly recommend this book, and I don't' think it was problematic in any way, but if it is please let me know.

"I came to France for Theo, I stay here for myself. I don't plan on setting foot beyond these borders until this country is free from Hitler's hands and until we're all free from the Nazi's tight noose. That's my newest mission - not vengeance or punishment, but this small speck of hope that this world won't always be rules by the swastika. And I swear to that on my name.. Lucie Blaise." 

I won an arc of this book in a Twitter giveaway.