Under Two Flags by Janis Robinson Daly is historical fiction that reads like a staged memoir: Josephine Therese Marzynski, a young Jewish woman from Boston, goes to Berlin in late 1916 to study opera, only to find herself living inside the tightening grip of World War I, where suspicion, rationing, propaganda, and fear seep into everyday life. The book opens in 1918 with Josephine back in Boston, preparing to tell her story with the help of a publisher, framing everything that follows as a deliberate act of witness and persuasion.

What grabbed me first was how Daly builds Josephine’s inner life through concrete moments instead of speeches. The arrival sequence is a gut check. We watch Josephine get inspected like a threat, even while she’s carrying “harmless sheet music,” and we feel the private defiance of her sewing an American flag into her skirt and later hiding it in her pillowcase. The writing leans into bodily details, the hot embarrassment, the cold air, the nervous calculation of what to say and what to swallow. It makes the big theme of “patriotism” feel small and personal, like something you tuck into a hem and hope no one notices.

I also liked the author’s structural choice to treat the novel like an opera in itself, with an Overture, Acts, Scenes, and even musical notations sprinkled in. It could have felt gimmicky, but for me it mostly works because it matches Josephine’s mind. She hears life in cues and crescendos, and she uses performance as survival. There’s even room for humor when it fits, like the bitter, half-laughing talk among women who are stuck eating carrots over and over, trying to make scarcity feel normal for one more day. Those lighter beats do not erase the dread. They just make the dread more believable, because that’s how people cope.

What stayed with me after I closed it was the tension baked into the title. Josephine is always balancing, not just between nations, but between versions of herself: dutiful daughter, ambitious musician, “good girl” who knows when to wink and when to keep quiet. The book is also honest about how identity can be both shelter and target. She’s American, she’s Jewish, she has German roots, and none of those labels stay simple once the war machine starts deciding who gets to be “safe.” I appreciated the grounding too: Daly is upfront that this is fiction inspired by real events and tied to a memoir (With Old Glory in Berlin) connected to her own family, which adds a quiet sense of responsibility to the storytelling.

If you enjoy historical fiction, especially stories that zoom in on one woman’s day-to-day choices inside a huge world event, this one is worth your time. I’d recommend it most to readers who like war-era settings without wanting only battlefield scenes, and to anyone curious about the intersection of art and survival, like how a voice trained for opera can double as armor. If you want an immersive, human-scale WWI novel with music in its bones, you’ll heartily enjoy Under Two Flags.

Pages: 290 | ISBN : 978-1685137328