The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

[gilda_elise]

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.

The story moves smoothly between the two times: 1940 France, and 2005 America. Eva is in her 80’s when she is drawn back to Europe in search of a part of her past.

Eva’s harrowing ordeal is only part of what drew me in, mostly because the reader knows that she survives. Mostly, I think it was the people of the Resistance, the brave men and women who take Eva in and make her one of their own. They may not be able to fight, but they do what they can to save lives.

Which was great, because Eva, well, she could be so indecisive, I felt like shaking her sometime. She would make a bad decision, regrets it, and then make the same decision again. Her harridan of a mother only makes things worse. I often that wished Eva had been left on her own. Perhaps then the story would have had a different ending. And speaking of endings. Sixty years, really? People change a lot in sixty years. And while I enjoyed the ending, it would have made more sense to me if it had only been ten or twenty.

Still, I did enjoy the book. I found Eva’s story engaging and enjoyed learning more about the French Resistance.




Mount TBR 2022 Book Links


Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.



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5. Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2) by Stephen King
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8. Nightmare Country by Marlys Millhiser
9. The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde, Diane Oatley (translator)
10. 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King
11. The Bear (The Grizzly King: A Romance of the Wild) by James Oliver Curwood
12. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
13. The Wrong End of Time by John Brunner
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16. The Virtues of War by Stephen Pressfield
17. Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs by Pat Shipman
18. The Man in the Moss by Phil Rickman
19. The Redemption of Wolf 302 by Rick McIntyre
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21. Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism by Laura E. Gómez
22. The Cold Calling (The Cold Calling #1) by Phil Rickman
23. The Keep (Adversary Cycle #1) by F. Paul Wilson
24. Pines (Wayward Pines #1) by Blake Crouch
25. The Speed of Souls: A Novel for Dog Lovers by Nick Pirog
26. The Yorkists: The History of a Dynasty by Anne Crawford
27. With Face Aflame by A.E. Walnofer
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29. Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton
30. Wardenclyffe (The Secret History of the World) by F. Paul Wilson
31. Goblin by Josh Malerman
32. The Queen Who Never Was by Maureen Peters
33. The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984 by Dorian Lynskey
34. Richard III’s Books by Anne F. Sutton & Livia Visser-Fuchs
35. Gwendy's Final Task (The Button Box #3) by Stephen King, Richard Chizmar
36. Malorie (Bird Box #2) by Josh Malerman
37. Where We Come From by Oscar Cásares
38. The Unconquered Sun by Ralph Dulin
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41. The X Factor by Andre Norton
42. The Last Wild Horses (Climate Quartet #3) by Maja Lunde, Diane Oatley (Translator)
43. The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner
44. Double Threat by F. Paul Wilson
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46. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
47. Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan
48. Mean Spirit (The Cold Calling #2) by Phil Rickman
49. The Killing of Richard the Third (Henry Morane #1) by Robert Farrington
50. The Curious Case of H. P. Lovecraft by Paul Roland
51. Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood
52. The Great God Pan and Other Classic Horror Stories by Arthur Machen
53. He Who Types Between the Rows: A Decade of Horror Drive-In by Mark Sieber
54. Night After Night (The Cold Calling #03) by Phil Rickman
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63. Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes
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73. The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes
74. The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny by Daisy Dunn
75. Vox by Christina Dalcher



76. The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel

Comments

[tinny]

Interesting topic!

[gilda_elise]

It really was. And not something I'd read much about before, so that made it doubly so.

[justjo2u]

Sounds like it would be a good book but with Eva not being the best of characters I would probably find it hard to stick too.

[gilda_elise]

Oddly enough, I was able to continue reading, even with the character's flaws. But they keep a good book from being a great one.