The Library Book

 The library has always been a magical place for me.  Just like the author, Susan Orlean, writes about in this book, The Library Book, I have since childhood loved the idea of walking through the library stacks picking out my pile of books to take home and read, returning them for in exchange for more.  There was a time where I also felt a need to buy books to hold onto and my house has bookshelves in many of the rooms.

Sitting surrounded by books is a warm feeling for me and the idea of shopping in the library now, bringing home books that I can read and return, saving money is as good as a bookstore. I love the friendship, camaraderie and quiet of the library.

This book has been patiently waiting for me to pick it up.  To read about libraries and how there was a possibility that someone would set fire to one was intriguing. This book is interesting for a bibliophile.

You learn about the history of libraries and especially about the Los Angeles library system and Central Library.  You also learn about the sad life of Harry Peak, who was always looking for attention and wanted to be known.  He has gained that notoriety now as the Library arsonist.

As Orlean writes, "The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to be forgotten - that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappoints and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world and then we vanish, and the mark is erased and it is as if we never existed."  This is a conundrum I have been wrestling with for the last few years also.  How do we make our mark so that we stand out from the multitudes and will be remembered.   

This is why Orlean says she wrote this book. It also could be a reason Harry Peak behaved the way he did. People want to feel special. Peak is seems was a lost soul and had trouble in life finding his path.

This book is so much more than just a book about libraries or the fire that consumed Los Angeles Public Library.  This book helps the library live on in our memories.  It also gives the author's childhood memory of visiting the library with her mother and her memory of visiting the library with her son permanent record.  

Cocktails and Murder

These novels keep coming one right after another.  Still a fun light entertaining mystery series about Ellie who is visiting her Aunt Olive at a Florida resort until after the New Year, when she will have to return to dreary London.

She is taking full advantage of the sunny, warm atmosphere and the friendly people she is meeting at the resort.  Each time there is another crime happening that Ellie just happens to trip across.  She overhears some significant conversations that send her investigating possibly where she should not really be.

Of course the police inspector always warns her off and tells her to mind her own business.  As she gets friendlier with the hotel staff and her romance builds with the resort doctor, she feels more embolden to follow her instincts and look into clues and get into trouble.

Each book has her solving the crime in a very amateurish way, but she is so adorable you are all in and cheering for her all the way.

The Exiles

 This is another fabulous book written by Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train and A Piece of the World.   

This time she has created an amazing plot based on real life experience using fictional characters, but just as powerful.  When the young governess is discharged and sent to debtor's prison we see the worst side of British history.  Following this young girl who, through ignorance and naive trust, faces a life she could never have imagined, we learn about the prison system and unfairness to women in 1840s London.  

Evangeline has led a sheltered life, in a small village as the vicar's daughter.  When her father passes on, she is left to fend for herself at the young age of 20 years old.  She answers an advertisement for a nanny and heads out into the world of sophisticated London.  Wooed by the young gentleman of the house she is working in she is fooled into believing he has the same feelings for her she has developed for him.  When the lady of the house has her arrested and no one comes to her defense she is once again on her own but this time so much worse off.

At this time prisoners are being shipped to Australia to start a new British colony there.  After serving their prisons sentences working hard, people are able to start their lives there, building families and working.  We learn so much about "Van Diemen’s Land", a penal colony in Australia., which was populated for Britain by prisoners sent by boat to inhabit and start businesses and families there.  

Evangeline and the people she meets along the way, some are kind and helpful and some are mean and uncaring.  Some are just downright evil.  Sometimes life throws curves in your way and it is how prepared to deal with them and who assists you along the way that can make all the difference.

An incredibly well written and powerful plot that will stay with you long after you close the book.

So much history for us all still to learn.

What The Night Sings

This is listed as a Young Adult novel, written by Vesper Stamper.

This is a wonder story of what it was like after the war is over and the survivors are trying to rejoin the land of the living.  It is a story of the displaced persons camps that were created and the people who are living there.  How do you come to grips with your situation and learn to eat, accept life and love again.  A story of how we see ourselves and how we can remake ourselves.  If you have created an image of who you are and how you look to the world and then all that gets stripped away, how do you cope and recreate yourself?  The very idea that you can is the message of this novel.

I think so many of us come to a point in our early lives where we decide that we are going to be whatever profession we think is correct for us.  We pick a type of person we want to present to the outside and work to make that person walk in our shoes.  We think of a type of person we want as a mate and the kinds of friends we think are popular.  But what happens if somewhere along the way all that changes through no fault or thought of our own.  Then do we close down and give up or get up, dust ourselves off and recreate and redirect our energy in a new direction?

This is the story of Gerta Rausch, a young girl who grows up with her father and his friend Maria Buchner.  Maria is a diva, an opera singer who is teaching Gerta to sing even though she is technically too young to begin sining opera.  Gerta's father is a concert violist.  Gerta and father moved in with Maria when Gerta's mother died, though Gerta was so young she does not remember how.

Now the Nazis are taking over and Jews are slowly being driven away and have to identify with a yellow star on their clothing.  Gerta and her father go out of the house less and less often, but Gerta does not realize it is because they are Jewish.  When they are finally rounded up, she is confused.  She did not realize they were Jewish.  She is taken to the Theresienstadt camp first and plays her father's viola there.  Then later she is transferred to Auschwitz and plays the viola there so she is still alive when the camp is liberated.  

Now she is in her teens and alone in the world at the displaced persons camp trying to get healthy, and figure out how to move forward with her life.  This is a powerful novel with an incredible message.  Gerta shows the reader how to stay strong and determined in the face of adversity.  But along the way you need friends and support to really make it through.

Crossing The Lines

 Crossing The Lines is written by one of my favorite authors, Sulari Gentil.  I have been following her series about a Australian aristocrat, Roland Sinclair, who has given up society life to paint and spend time with his friends, Milton, Clyde and the woman he loves, Edna.  They are always solving a crime though in a very low key way that sometimes almost does not seem like a mystery nove but reads more like historical fiction.

This time, Gentil takes the mystery novel art to a whole new level of intrigue.  This time Gentil is writing a mystery about Madeleine, who is a mystery author writing a novel about her character Edward but the lines become blurred as fiction and fact becomes more unclear and Edward seems to talking to Madeleine.  Madeleine falls down the rabbit hole of not being sure what is real and what is imagined.

Gentil writes this world so well.  It is fascinating to see the how the two mystery novels intersect.  Also there are so many fabulous quotes about writing in general and writing mysteries.  

Gentil writes about the writing process, "And so the story is about...?  It's an exploration of an author's relationship with her protagonist, an examination of the tenuous line between belief and reality, imagination and self, and what happens when that line is crossed."

This is like a story within a story within a story and then sometimes you wonder if Gentil is not writing about herself and Rowland, mystery series protagonist.  Does she sometimes forget he is just a character and think that he has stepped off the page and joined her at the kitchen table?

A Bend in the Stars

Such a beautifully written novel.  Rachel Barenbaum has created a version of the world in Russia at the time of the eclipse  that is completely believable.  So many times while reading the book, I paused to double check a name or even the cover of the book to remind myself that it was all fiction and not really based on a real person of history.

This is a story of a young Russian Jew, who was working on the theory of relativity at the same that Einstein is developing his theory and Russia is on the brink of war.  Vanya and Miri are two Jewish siblings living with their grandmother after the death of their parents in an accident.  Their grandmother who escaped from Russian pogroms against Jews has brought these siblings up to watch their back and be wary at all times.  Now with the the start of the war in 1914, they are again up against prejudice and are hoping to escape to America. 

Vanya is studying the science of relativity at the University and realizes that he is close to beating Einstein if he can only get to see the eclipse first hand and have a photograph of the event.  With this information he has been invited to bring his family to Harvard to teach.  

Miri is also an exceptional student.  She has been given the education to become a doctor, something extremely unheard of in Russia in 1914.  When she realizes her brother's fate is in jeopardy as he travels to see the eclipse, she follows him to warn him.  

Vanya travels with Miri's fiancé and together they fight their way across the country.  Miri sets out to follow them with a wounded Jewish soldier to has escaped his unit.  There is intrigue as they defy the odds against soldiers and others willing to sell out a Jew for money.  There is romance and the race against the clock and time.  

While reading this terrific story you also learn about the science of the time, relativity and the bending of light and the science of time.  Telling time, clocks and how time is set.  Today we look at a clock and know that all across the world we are looking at the same time.  But then time could be off by minutes from place to place, country to country.