The Diamond Eye

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-19

Chapters 20-24

Interlude 6-Chapter 27

Interlude 7-Chapter 30

Chapter 31-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary

Mila’s narration here turns retrospective as she intersperses her postwar story with memories that are absent from her published memoir, presumably due to Soviet censorship. Quinn employs this device in several chapters. Official accounts of Mila’s life would require her to emphasize patriotism at the expense of reality. June 1941 finds her in the Black Sea city of Odessa, a popular tourist destination, though she is working in the local library to earn money before her final year of university. Mila refers to her thesis as a “dissertation,” though the Russian term may also be rendered as “senior thesis.” She is studying Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s decision to ally Ukraine with Russia rather than the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but her friend Sofya persuades her to go swimming.

Mila and Sofya join their friends Vika and Grigory. Mila is lost in thoughts of her son, as she has just separated from him for the first time for this temporary job. She rebuffs Grigory’s attempt to flirt with her, as she has little in common with him and no room for distractions. In her narration, the older Mila reflects that all their concerns of that day would soon vanish, and “within the year half the people at our table would be dead” (35). The turning point comes when Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov announces the German invasion and the new state of war.

Mila goes with her friends to the opera as planned but leaves early, consumed with outrage over the invasion and what it means for Slavka’s future. Mila’s narration declares, “I’d vowed to be Slavka’s father as well as his mother. And in times of war fathers go to fight for their children” (40). She enlists in the Red Army, still dressed in her formal wear.

Chapter 4 Summary

Mila calls her parents to inform them she is leaving for the front, relieved she will not have to tell Slavka in person. She boards a train for the war’s southern front, a region then known as Bessarabia (now primarily divided between Ukraine and Romania). She is briefly intimidated by being surrounded by men, until a young woman named Lena Paliy introduces herself. Lena is a medical student who is signing up for wartime hospital service, and they soon bond over their shared patriotism and personal histories. Mila describes Alexei to her new friend, explaining that his seduction only worked because she was impressed by his surgical skill. At her last meeting with Alexei, he humiliated her by making her jump for a university enrollment form that required his signature as her spouse.

Mila and Lena arrive at the front, where there is the distinct smell of “trees and smoke and blood” (47). She and Lena cut one another’s hair, as a concession to wartime conditions, hoping to be less conspicuous as women. Officers attempt to assign Mila to medical duty rather than to combat, despite her rifle skills. She is ultimately sent to dig trenches, as there is no weapon available. She spends weeks digging and marching under enemy fire until the day she takes a rifle from a fallen colleague’s hands.

Chapter 5 Summary

The narrative returns to Washington in August 1942 and the perspective of the American sniper. He impresses a journalist with his access to the White House breakfast later that day, inwardly priding himself on his undercover skills and ability to ingratiate himself with strangers. He hopes Mila is off balance and unhappy on unfamiliar ground. He is open to the possibility he will either kill her or leave her alive to take the blame for the president’s death.

Interlude 2 Summary: “Notes by the First Lady”

Eleanor Roosevelt is escorting the Soviet delegation members, Mila included, to their guest rooms. She remains haunted by her husband’s oblique reference to assassination. Mila’s abrupt closure of the window shades distracts her. The interpreter explains that Mila is uncomfortable with the exposure risk. Eleanor wonders what Mila could teach her about sensing danger.

Chapters 3-5 Analysis

At this stage, the reader meets the older Mila in the 1940s, on the verge of her transformation into a soldier. She still feels set apart from others her age by motherhood and her failed marriage. Her decision to enlist is rendered in emotional terms, shaped both by gender norms and by family bonds. She has promised her son that she will make up for Alexei’s faults, but her drive is deeper than that, as her love for her son and her love for her country are intertwined. Joining the fight allows her to preserve his future, to protect him in the ways she could not at the firing range four years before. By asserting that Mila’s real activities and emotions are absent from her official memoir, Quinn makes room for artistic license and emphasizes that the real emotions of war are untidy and difficult.

Mila is still wearing feminine formal wear when she enlists in the army, and this image of her reinforces the novel’s themes of Gender Norms and the Nature of Heroism. She avoids saying goodbye to her family in person, knowing that sentiment will test her new resolve to fight. Her friendship with Lena, and their rapid solidarity with one another as women, introduces the theme of Emotional Bonds in Wartime. While Mila feels alien among her Odessa friends, she and Lena quickly bond over their shared patriotism and gender. Furthermore, Mila and Lena help one another cast aside feminine gender presentation as a concession to their new wartime reality. It is telling that Mila recalls her relationship with Alexei at this moment: Alexei took her choices from her, unconcerned with her consent or their age difference. As an adult, Mila chooses to enlist knowing the consequences and her own mind, but she remains aware of her history of powerlessness at the hands of men.

The harsh description of Mila’s early combat days offer further contrast with the bright, conventional war narrative of her official memoir. First, she fights the assumption that women belong in medical settings, not battle, and faces the material shortages that characterized the early Soviet war effort. She gains a rifle only because another soldier dies, not because those around her believe in her skills. In the interlude, Mila has grown confident, leaving a woman even as privileged and powerful as Eleanor Roosevelt wishing for her advice.

The sniper’s narrative, together with Eleanor’s, reinforces these thematic notes. Like Mila and Lena, the sniper disguises key aspects of his nature, and no one around him suspects his real skills. His camouflage, however, is not for safety but to ensure he can enact harm. He thus functions as Mila’s foil, her temperamental and moral opposite, emphasizing her vulnerability and humanity.