As you’ve probably noticed, Nicole’s Nook has a new look. I finally sat down to took time over February break to add a new theme and categorize my posts more thoughtfully. It is now much easier to use the menu to search for book reviews by genre. I have consistently posted my favorite book of the month since I started the blog in August of 2021. That leaves out a lot of great books I read before then. So, I thought it would be fun to search through my goodreads and share some of my highest rated books prior to starting Nicole’s Nook.
Today’s book: The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel
Publication Date: July 21, 2020
Date Read: January 2, 2021
My rating: 4 Stars
Favorite Quote: “There’s something almost miraculous about seeing a child’s eyes light up when you hand him a book that intrigues him. I’ve always thought that it’s those children—the ones who realize that books are magic—who will have the brightest lives.”
― Kristin Harmel, The Book of Lost Names
Goodreads Synopsis:
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.
My Thoughts
While I haven’t done a review of this book before, it has shown up on several lists. If you are a regular visitor to Nicole’s Nook, you know I read a lot of books set in WWII. This one has stayed with me for a couple of reasons. First, it’s reverance for books and preserving identity. Eva and Remy not only create new identities fore refugees, but they also create a coded record of their real identies, for those too young to remember. Second, I love the characterization of Eva. In the present timeline, we see her as a quiet librarian, who most would perceive as living a boring life. But, we see in the past that she took extraordinary risks to save countless people. It really shows the assumptions society makes about the elderly. Lastly, I love the relationship between Remy and Eva. It adds just the right touch of romance without distracting from the main story.