BLUE RIBBONS, BITTER BREAD Joice Lock--Australia's Most Heroic Woman

This biography examines the life of humanitarian and journalist Joice NanKivell Loch from her childhood on failing Australian farms to her death in Greece in her 90s. Narrator Deidre Rubenstein exhibits an astonishing facility with accents as she takes us around the world with Loch; there seems to be no accent she cannot master. Loch leaves rural Australia in search of a university education in Melbourne, becomes a journalist in Ireland at a time when the IRA was targeting the English, works for Quaker relief missions in Poland and Greece following WWI, and helps smuggle thousands of Poles and Jews out of Romania just before the Nazi invasion in WWII. While Rubenstein's pacing is too deliberate and a little more oomph wouldn't have gone amiss, she sensitively renders grief, fear, and excitement. A.B. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2018]