Between the Lions

 This is a fascinating novel about the New York City Public Library.  It seems to be based on some real facts but is a novel with all fictional characters and a very intriguing plot.  Starting with the interesting tidbit that the two lions that stand perched outside on the sides of the steps leading into the library are Patience and Fortitude.

The characters of Laura Lyon and her husband and two children are fictional.  They live in an apartment hidden in the NYC Library.  There really seems to have been an apartment there at one time where the superintendent for the library lived.  But the story of the Lyons family and what happened at the library is all in Fiona Davis' mind.

Using her imagination to create a family who could have lived there. Fiona Davis builds beautifully on the idea of women's rights and changing times in America to create this novel.  We meet the Lyons family, husband, wife and two children as they are moving into the apartment in the New York City Library on Fifth Avenue.  Her family was against this marriage from the beginning because her husband really want s to be a writer.  He is working on his first novel, while working as the caretaker of the library. Laura is taking care of the children, but is starting to feel like she wants a career of her own.  She is accepted to NYU and is one of first four women in the journalism class of 1913.  As she is covering stories to practice her news reporting skills, she meet Amanda, a doctor helping low income women with their health needs.

Laura discovers the Heterodoxy Club—a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women’s rights.  For the first time she is questioning her traditional role as a wife and mother and is looking to take on this new persona.

When tragedy starts to invade her family life she realizes that she may have made a mistake and that she really cannot have it all.  There is a cost to happiness and self gratification.  

Eighty years later,  Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the famous essayist Laura Lyons.  Sadie has landed her dream job as a curator at the New York Public Library.  She is in charge of displaying a retrospective of the life of Laura Lyons.  As Sadie finds out more and more about her grandmother she is unsure she wants the people she works with to know they are related.  Then when a similar tragedy strikes the library, Sadie needs to solve the eighty year old puzzle and fix the wrongs of the past and the present.

A wonderful novel to sink your teeth into and stay up late reading.