Hi y’all!

Merry almost Christmas! I hope you are enjoying your holiday season full of your favorite holiday traditions and treats!

First, a small personal note. I recently started posting more on my bookstagram account. I’ve found that lots of authors are active on Instagram and appreciate reviews there. While gaining followers isn’t my goal with blogging, I do love connecting with fellow bookish people. I will continue my blog as it’s always been a place for me to share my bookish thoughts apart from my role as wife and mother. I’d love to have you be a part of my Instagram community as well 🙂 If you’re interested, check out my Instagram account here.

I am thrilled to share my review of The Book of Lost Names by Kristen Harmel. This is one of my favorite historical fiction reads of the year.  I really enjoyed this novel about Nazi occupied France and the Resistance movement including forgery. I loved the celebration of books and the power of words. I loved Eva’s passion for literature and how she finds hope, healing, and God in books.

Book Summary: “Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer—but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

An engaging and evocative novel reminiscent of The Lost Girls of Paris and The Alice Network, The Book of Lost Names is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of bravery and love in the face of evil.“

Eva is a fantastic protagonist. She is talented, hard working, kind, and willing to sacrifice a lot for others especially children. I loved seeing her journey as she begins helping the Resistance and all she discovers about herself. She realizes that she can do so much good for people that are wrongly accused and even killed. I appreciated how she holds onto her faith amidst intense obstacles and how she allows her faith and relationship with God to change. Her talent for forgery was fascinating and her budding relationship with Remy was simply beautiful.

Remy and Eva are a beautiful, tragic couple. I enjoyed seeing their relationship begin as a forced partnership, grow into friendship, and then into something more. When they begin to realize how much they mean to each other, they try to fight their growing affections. But some things are meant to be. I felt there was the right amount of tension and passion in their story. They spend a lot of time apart and even more time trying to deny their feelings for each other. But they make each other better. They build each other up and bring out the best in each other. They care about each other deeply and you can’t help but hope for them. There is one scene that is not quite closed door. But it is tastefully done and short. The ending is full of surprises and a beautiful conclusion to their story.

I was absolutely fascinated by the descriptions of forgery and resistance during WWII France. Learning about the complicated processes of forgery was so interesting. The different details that make up that process were intense: pen type and color, paper type, stamps, handwriting, location, finding new names, and how to remember the names you erase. I loved the book of names and how Eva and Remy protect the lost names of the children they help. The code is clever and the way they include the children and themselves was so beautiful. It was sad to hear about the many deaths, betrayals, and fears that these brave people dealt with everyday. But to also read about their strength, their hope, and their success was so inspiring. So many people were saved because of the hard work of the resistance. An amazing story!

I loved this book. Beautiful and complex characters throughout, compelling storytelling especially in the WWII France timeline, and a lovely tribute to the power of kindness and books.

What are some of your favorite WWII novels?
Which historical settings are most interesting to you?