The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles

I'm a total sucker for World War II historical fiction, so when the publisher offered me a Netgalley of The Paris Library, it was a no brainer.

We meet Odile Souchet in two stages of life, first in 1939 in Paris, where she has just accepted her dream job at the the American Library in Paris and again in 1980s Montana where a lonely girl named Lily wonders what brought her unusual neighbor to her tiny country town all the way from France.  Young Odile is emotional and impetuous and entirely unprepared for the years of war and occupation that soon overtake her beloved Paris.  Even as she clings to normalcy at the library, where she befriends a rich and quirky cast of characters, her world is changing.  Determined to keep providing books to soldiers and Parisians alike, the staff of the library bands together to stay open, daring even to deliver books to their Jewish subscribers who have been ordered by the occupying Nazis not to enter.

As the war wears on, Odile finds that she doesn't know anyone as well as she thought she did, including herself.  Slowly Odile's eyes are opened to the cold realities of the wartime world even as her blinders to her own privilege fall away.  Unfortunately, when stubborn, outspoken Odile, causes irreparable harm with just a few thoughtless words, her life takes on an unexpected trajectory.

In more modern day Montana, Lily endures a tragedy at home and takes refuge in her newfound friendship with the town's outsider, Odile.  Together the two will finish the learning the same lessons that Odile began to learn in wartime Paris.  Together they'll learn the power of forgiveness and what it means to truly put yourself in someone else's shoes.

Admittedly, I've been a little tired of the dual narrative historical fiction with a modern day perspective thrown in, but I warmed to it over the course of the book.  What's remarkable about this plot device in The Paris Library is that the modern day perspective really pulls its own weight and doesn't become an interlude to hurry away from to get back to the historical story.  Lily is an honest, genuine character and her budding friendship with and curiosity about Odile provides a generous framework for the historical story.

Charles beautifully brings to life her Paris Library characters who are based on the real people who heroically kept the library open through the years of the occupation.  She excellently captures their comradery and the magic of the place Odile loves so much.  Odile herself is a bewilderingly naive character that it took me a little work to like, but as the story proceeds, her coming of age, while slow, is ultimately believable.

 The Paris Library should satisfy World War II fiction lovers and book lovers alike.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

How old is the oldest book on your physical TBR pile?  Girl in Hyacinth Blue has been on my shelves for thirteen years, at least according to LibraryThing which claims I cataloged it there in 2007.  I'm afraid, it's probably not the most shamefully longsuffering of my neglected TBR.  Happily for it, with a boost from a Litsy challenge, it finally got its moment this year.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a novel in short stories.  I usually find this kind of thing to be a bit of a bait and switch.  When I read a novel, I want it to be a novel.  In my middle age, I've developed an appreciation for short stories that has been hard won over a few decades of not caring for them.  Nonetheless, I generally don't like to be surprised by short stories hiding inside a novel.  Here, though, I'll make an exception because how beautifully they're handled and because of the common thread of the painting around which all of them revolve.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue follows a lost, forgotten Vermeer masterpiece from its painting to the study of the son of a Nazi, only it's done in reverse.  As we follow the painting back in time, we meet a son tortured by his father's war crimes so dissonant with the man he knows, a Jewish girl making a sacrifice for safety that is hardly guaranteed, a couple troubled by a husband's former love, a philandering wife matched by a philandering husband, a couple who rescues a baby during a flood, and on back to Vermeer himself struggling to make ends meet and wondering if he shouldn't take a proper job to provide for his impoverished family but unable to turn away from the transcendent beauty that draws his eye and his talent always back to painting.

Though a slim book, Girl in Hyacinth Blue in its journey through history is filled with the richness of human experience and captures all manner of people who themselves are captured by the beauty of  a painting of a girl they will never know and yet feel a kind of kinship with.  The idea of following a painting through history is fascinating on its own.  Vreeland's execution of it is what is truly sublime.

Historical Reviewlettes

These reviewlettes are historical in more ways then one.  First of all, they're all historical fiction.  Secondly, I read them all like a ludicrously long time ago, so the finer plot points are lost to the sands of time and memory.  That said, I seem to be fully incapable of sending them off on their next adventure until I comment on them in some way because they were all so good.  

First up, we have The Gown by Jennifer Robson.  And really do I even need to tell you to read this book?  I mean, look at it, with a cover like that, this book sells itself.  Amiright?

Not convinced?  OK, fine, I'll try to use my words.

The Gown is set in post-World War II London where Ann Hughes and Miriam Dassin meet in the embroidery workroom of Norman Hartnell's famed fashion house.  Ann is an English girl who began at Hartnell as an apprentice and risen through the ranks.  Miriam has come from France, having survived the Holocaust, now seeking to put her prodigious embroidery skills to work.  Though the hardship and scarcity of the war linger, the excitement of Princess Elizabeth's upcoming wedding finally gives the British people cause for celebration, and the gown will be made at Hartnell.

The historical tale was so rich, it hardly needed a modern day perspective of Ann's granddaughter unearthing her grandmother's long kept secrets, but the modern perspective didn't take away either.  I loved this tale of friendship, its capturing of England's hesitant first steps away from the war, the setting of the fashion house, and the excitement of the wedding.  The Gown is a beautifully told story of two friends and England's reawakening after the ravages of World War II.

Next up, we've got The Visitors by Sally Beauman.  I've always been a touch fascinated by Egypt and the Pyramids, and I was totally taken in by this historical tale of two young girls who become friends in 1922 Egypt, just at the time that the excavations in the Valley of Kings finally yield the ultimate find.  I loved how this book was told from the perspective of two young girls, one the daughter of expatriate archaeologists.  They're caught up in the middle of the Egypt-mania that has seized the English.  The tensions between the wealthy sponsors of the digs and the ambitious archaeologists determined to find Tutankhamun's tomb are rife.  The girls realize something untoward is afoot but can't quite grasp it.  This is a long book that doesn't feel long.  I relished every page of Beauman's richly drawn Egypt and her cast of characters all entangled in the intrigue of robbing a nation of its treasures at any cost.  If I reread books, I'd reread this one.

Last but not least, Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.  Tipping the Velvet is the first Sarah Waters novel I read but I hope it won't be the last because it was fantastic.

In it, oyster girl, Nan King, falls in love with Kitty Butler, a girl playing a boy in a music hall act.  Nan is swept away to London where the two perform together and carry on a covert love affair, The two are desperately in love but too afraid of being discovered to last.  Abandoned by Kitty, Nan finds herself alone in gritty Victorian London with nothing but a broken heart and a trunk full of male clothes from the act.  As a boy, Nan works the streets.  At loose ends, she takes up with all manner of characters, and the story reveals the dirty underbelly of Victorian London as Nan embarks on a number of troubling sexual "adventures."  This book, too, is the richest of historical portrayals and Nan is a remarkable character.  Her story from its beginnings with a sweet and exciting love affair to her search for love and belonging in all the wrong places and on to the redemption that seemed unreachable but perhaps is not, is totally compelling.

All of these reads are so remarkable that even years after reading, I still remember them well!

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this one, perhaps because it’s such a slim volume that seems to get swallowed up in the overabundance for my bookshelves.  

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is the beautiful, poetically rendered story of Japanese picture brides, lured to the American west coast in the early 20^th century by promises of a new life and young husbands made wealthy in a nation where the “streets are made of gold.”  The reality of the life they find is much different, filled with grueling work, devious men, ignorance, and racism.


Otsuka tells their stories as a collective, using the first-person plural “we” throughout the book, and what could easily become an irritating conceit is instead wielded with power to tell the story of many in few words.  While there may not be a specific character to latch on to, Otsuka manages to beautifully capture the essence of a whole experience, nimbly passing from woman to woman, from the farm worker, to the laundress, to the maid until she has drawn out the breadth of their experience.  A powerful story, beautifully told.  Highly recommended.

The Uninvited by Cat Winters

It took reading this whole book, putting it down for a week, and then picking it back up today to write this review for it to occur to me that every time I look at the cover I get a certain Alanis Morissette tune in my head, Uninvited.  Ah, I am so self-aware.  The moral of the story is that I think I have to review this book immediately or face the possibility of never getting this song out of my head despite it having nothing much to do with the book other than the title in common.

The Uninvited starts off with a bang when twenty-five year old Ivy Rowan, who has always seen ghosts when someone close to her is about to die, finally gives up her reclusive life on her family's farm and moves into the town of Buchanan.  On that night in 1918 as World War I rages, fueled by booze, paranoia, and grief Ivy's father and younger brother beat a German furniture store owner to death.  Finally realizing that there's nothing she can do to protect her family from her volatile father, Ivy determines finally to leave home to start a new life. 

In a chain of events that is nothing if not surreal, newly liberated Ivy takes a room with the war widow of the most popular guy in her high school class, assists two young women desperately if inexpertly driving an ambulance around the poorer side of town where influenza victims are dying by the dozen, and is lured by jazz music to a dance at the Masonic Lodge - a dance that seems to know no race or prejudice.  In the meantime, she is riddled with guilt over her father and brother's dreadful deed and comes to know and love the surviving brother of the man they killed.  As Ivy drifts through her new life with a sleepless fanaticism, making new friends, connecting with old ones, and trying her best to atone for her family's failings, she begins to see the ghosts of the people she knows to be dead and fears the worst for her mother and her newfound lover.  It's not long until Ivy's journey of self-discovery takes an unexpected turn, and everything she knows about herself and her new life is called into question.

It took a little while for me to settle into the reading of The Uninvited.  Being dropped into a life on the cusp of change and one that is changing so radically is hard to catch up with.  Ivy's new life is rendered in such a way that it seems almost dreamlike, with chance encounters and forbidden loves that spin her in a radically different direction than what she has ever known.  With an odd combination of jazz music, World War I generated paranoia, and the plague of influenza, Winters makes a vivid setting of downtown Buchanan.  The fear and frenzy there is palpable and contributes to the unsettled feeling of the narrative.

Ivy herself is lovable character, a young woman who waited too long to discover herself.  I was both amazed and appalled by the journey her guilt led her on.  Winters does a perfect job of rendering Ivy's new life in a way that is satisfying but feels, deliberately, just the slightest bit off so that when the unexpected occurs, all the pieces are ready to fall into place.   

I'll be honest, I was expecting more ghosts and less coming of age, but I still liked what this book delivered, which is a great historical coming of age story with a twist that makes it hard to put down.  In The Uninvited, Cat Winters has written a ghost story that is less about death and more about learning to live.

(Thanks to the publisher for providing my copy in exchange for review consideration.)

Open Wounds by Joseph Lunievicz

Cid Wymann has hardly been out of his apartment until the day he secretly follows his grandmother to her Saturday church services. Little does 7-year-old Cid know that this small feat of daring will open up a whole new world, because, you see, his grandmother isn't bound for church at all, but to the matinee of Captain Blood. On this day, Cid falls in love with the world of film not to mention that of swashbuckling sword fighters.

Life isn't easy for Cid, though. His father is a drunk, and his grandmother is so strict she hardly lets him out of the house. Just as Cid is making his first friends in Siggy Braun and Tomik Kopecky who band together to battle the bullies in their Queens neighborhood, Cid's father disappears and his grandmother dies leaving him orphaned. When Cid ends up an orphanage, he learns that he can't count on anyone and that the easiest way to solve problems is with his fists. Cid's on a long road to nowhere when his badly wounded World War I vet cousin, Winston "Lefty" Leftingsham shows up and makes of himself an unlikely hero. A former Shakespearean actor, Lefty takes Cid under his wing and introduces him to acting and soon enough has him practicing fencing with a down on his luck, drunken Russian fencing instructor, who once taught fencing to the Tsar's court but now finds himself in exile.

Open Wounds is one of my favorite YA reads of the year, nay one of my favorite reads of the year period. Lunievicz brings Depression/World War II Era New York City vividly to life. You can feel the cold wind buffeting Cid and his grandmother when they come up from the subway where a sign cautions to "hold your hat." Everything from Cid's hard-up Queens neighborhood where his neighbors on the verge of eviction mount a last stand against the police to the "Jewish Quarter" of the Lower East Side where Siggy ends up trying to make ends meet by selling pickles is perfectly detailed.

Lunievicz's characters leap off the page. They are perfectly unique, fierce on the outside but with hearts of gold that render them hugely sympathetic as their histories are revealed. Cid is lost and damaged after a childhood of being abused and abandoned. He's grown a tough outer shell, but his childhood love of movies and his dreams of fencing are still alive. Lefty is not the savior every kid dreams of, rather he is a badly disfigured eccentric veteran whose morphine habit and rough exterior make him hard to get close to, but he's much more than that as Cid (and readers!) get to know. Cid's fenching instructor, Nikolai Varvarinski, is a sloppy drunk, but a gifted teacher, and even he is more than what he seems. Each character has a carefully drawn backstory, which is slowly revealed, that informs their actions.

Readers will find themselves unable to resist rooting for this misfit crew as they prepare Cid for an ultimate fencing showdown that will resolve much unfinished business from his past. I was utterly captivated by this redemptive coming of age story. There's struggle and triumph, laughter and tears. Lunievicz has crafted a story that it's easy to get lost in, full of characters that should be unlovable or even downright repellant, but who feel like family when the last page is turned.

(Disclaimer: I met Joe Lunievicz at a BEA event, where we enjoyed a lovely evening at Serendipity 3 compliments of JKS Communications. He is super-nice, and I picked up a copy of the book from the Book Blogger Con swag pile with some trepidation because, for some reason, I worried I might not like it and would have to write a "meh" sort of book review, which I would have done, because that's what I do when the book calls for it. But I need not have worried, and really, *you* need not worry, because I am in no way compromising my reviewish integrity by saying I loved this book because I really did. Is this overkill on the disclaimer front?)