NSP30
Charmingly Bland
- Thread starter
- #41
I finished The Book of Lost Names
The Book of Lost Names is beautiful, heartwrenching, and inspiring tale of Eva a sharp witted librarian living in Florida who spots a book that she had not seen in years which serves as a reminder of a life in France that she has rarely spoken of but has never forgotten. Born to Jewish parents, Eva is doing her best to make the most of her life in Nazi occupied France as a beautiful yet shy young woman. One day she gets a tip from a friend that police will be raiding apartments to send Jews east to the camps which she and family do not heed. On the night, that her apartment is raided she and her mother watches the two children of her next door neighbor in their apartment but her father who stayed home is not so lucky and is rounded up with other Jews and left to a fate unknown to Eva. The book takes off after that with a guilt ridden Eva desperate to find her father and reunite him with her mother so that their family can flee into neutral Switzerland. On that perilous quest to reunite her family, using her intelligence Eva plots a strategy for her and her mother to flee Paris which lands them in a small French town in occupy free France. There Eva's life will change forever for she will experience, friendship, love, heartache, lost, strife, and most importantly purpose during the most trying and terrifying time of her life. A while ago, I read an article about the framing of the Holocaust in history now that many of its survivors are slowly dying off, I would never claim that historical fiction can replace those personal accounts, but the article did make me think about the protagonists who are at the center of these stories and I decided that it was important for me to read books where Jewish people are the center of their stories and active in their own way (big or small) in the resistance of their occupation. That is what made this book so powerful to me Eva was a heroine who wanted to save herself and many others. The book is well written with a solid plot but I could have used a bit more information on the strategy intricacies of the resistance, still I thoroughly enjoyed The Book of Lost Names, I rate it 4.5 stars.