The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than 60 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 18th-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 does she have the strength to revisit old memories?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began 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.
This book was another pick by my monthly book club….and *another* historical fiction selection.
I do enjoy this genre, but since I had JUST read another one (that ALSO took place during wartime) I really was not in the mood for this read.
Which was a shame because I think if I would have been, my reading experience would have been MUCH different.
This was a well written, well researched book (the author based her characters on real life French citizen forgers) that was filled with information as well as emotion.
But I just was not that into it.
Sometimes I just have to be in the mood for certain books….and I most definitely was not in the mood for this one.
Which is a shame because I think the story was really great… I just didn’t really enjoy reading it.
This book was a good reminder to me that even when evil is quite prevalent everywhere, there are always plenty of those behind the scenes fighting for good….sometimes risking their lives so save countless others.
This is definitely not a light read, although there IS some romance sprinkled into the story.
I didn’t really like it but I am looking forward to talking about it to see what everyone else thought.
That’s about all I got to say on this one, yall. 🤷♀️