The Librarian Spy

 The Librarian Spy  written by Madaline Martin  is another in a long line of historical novels being written about books, libraries and the Holocaust.  Martin also wrote The Last Bookshop in London and The Keeper of Hidden Books both books about the role books and librarians played in World War II.

In this novel we meet two different women who lives were changed by World War II.  Helene who as a young married woman moves with her husband to Lyon, France from Paris.  There she is just a housewife as her husband tries to protect her from the horror of a war unfolding.  When he does not come home one evening from work, after they argued in the morning, Helene does not know what to think.  When she finds out her husband was a leader in the Resistance, she regrets the arguments they had before he left.  Taking on a new persona, Helene becomes Elaine and starts to work for the Resistance.  She is determined to make a difference in the war and help end the atrocities.  

Meanwhile living a different kind of life, Ava Harper leaves her job at the Library of Congress in the Rare Books room to come to Lisbon, Portugal to help the United States uncover what is happening in Europe.  She works reading the local newspapers and sending messages back to the US.  A coded message catches her eye and she gets involved in trying to rescue a young Jewish mother and her child in their effort to escape to America.  Ava also finds herself anxious to help the people who are being persecuted at personal risk to herself.  She must be careful when she finds the man across the hall ahs been taken away by police.  Then she is being followed and she realizes someone has been coming in her apartment looking throuogh her things.  It is a race against time to help Sarah and Noah get on a ship to the US

Based on a composite of real people and real events of World War II, Martin has created characters who are living the lives experiences she imagines were happening in Portugal and France in 1943.  This is a well researched novel that will leave you amazed by the bravery and caring of these characters.

The Matchmaker's Gift

 Today I read a book that felt like it was a cross between a historical novel and a rom-com.  It was a fun entertaining story that kept me entertained until the end.

The Matchmaker's Gift written by Lynda Cohen Loigman definitely fits the criteria for the historical fiction genre, but because you are reading about matchmaking and love it reads like a rom com.

Using the dual timeline approach to writing this novel, Loigman follows Sara Glikman as she comes from Europe to the Lower Eastside of the New York.  Arriving with her family in New York City as a young girl, Sara has already shown her matchmaking abilities on the boat creating a shidduch for her older sister.  As she grows up she finds creative ways to bring together the couples she knows will love each other and stayed married forever.  This causes problems in the neighborhood as it takes away  business from the Shadchanim.  These older men try to stop her but Sara is a strong young woman and stands up  to them.  

In the alternating plot line we meet Sara's granddaughter, Abby, starts reading the journals her grandmother left her.  Abby and her sister grew up with Sara and their mother, Beverly.  They are the product of an ugly divorce and Abby becomes a divorce lawyer to help women going through divorce not have the same experience her mother had.  Growing with her grandmother's stories, she never really paid attention.  Now as she reads through the accounts of the matches, she begins to question whether instead of helping couples end their marriages, she should be helping couples find true love.

The Magnolia Palace

Fiona Davis is one of my favorite authors. She writes historical fiction about the people and buildings of New York at the turn of the century.

The Magnolia Palace is a fascinating novel about one of the fabulous buildings still standing with a historical history in New York City.  This time Davis takes the Frick Mansion and a few actual facts about the building and the Frick family and weaves a beautiful, romantic amazing plot around those facts to flesh out the story.

In the book a young beautiful girl known as Angelica becomes the muse for many artists and sculptors.  Her likeness becomes famous as she posses for different statues that will be displayed all over New York.

When her mother dies and she is accused of a crime she insists she did not commit, she is forced to find a way to avoid jail time.  Running away and ending up on the stairs of the Frick Mansion just as the daughter, Helen is looking for a private secretary seems like the perfect solution.

Angelica is creating a new life for herself as Miss Lilly, the efficient secretary to Helen Frick who is turning her father's incredible art collection into a library of the art and its Provence .

There are so many amazing twists and turns as this plot develops.  The relationship between Helen and her father, mother and brother.  The interplay between Helen and Lillian.  Then Lillian and all the characters who pass through her life.  Failed romance and true love plays heavily in this novel and even just the love between family and employee and boss are complicated relationships.  A very compelling read.

Deacon Kong

Deacon Kong by James McBride is an unusual novel.  This book was outside my  regular reading selections, but once again,  I read it for a book group.  It is always interesting to be challenged outside your reading list and then to find it very interesting is a plus.

The main question I had while reading this books was; is  this book really written for a Black audience and would people of Color read this with a different perspective than I am.  Are there inside jokes or references that I am missing, but that make the book more enjoyable to people who are on the inside.  I  often wonder just that as I read a book that though for a main stream audience has what I feel are insider references and mentions to the Jewish culture or religion and I wonder what a non-Jewish reader thinks when reading the book.

This is a story of Deacon Kong, as he is known in the neighborhood  of Red Hook, NY.  He is an elderly man now, who came up from the South with his young bride, Hettie, many years ago.  He is a deacon in the local church and has coached the young people's basketball team for years.  When a young man who he felt had potential to escape the small world they live in, falls into drug dealing, he is upset and tries throughout the book to change the course of this young man's direction.  This book shows the dark side of the area with drugs and crime bosses.  But also tries to show the love and caring of the church and the neighborhood.  There is a multitude of characters, some are involved in crime and others show that there is still so much good in the world.  One young man, who inherited his business of crime from his father, decides he is ready to get out.  He finds a girl to marry and is closing up the business.  He is looking for answers his father never shared with him.  

There are unexpected relationships, and unexpected characters who show their caring disposition.  A very interesting novel.

SECRET IDENTITY

 Secret Identity written by Alex Segura is his  newest mystery novel.  A stand alone novel  after bringing  his last series to a close.

A mystery that ties the murder of a freelance cartoonist into a controversial money laundering scam between two comic book publishing companies.  A young woman, Carmen Valdez,  has come to NYC to make her name in the comic book  world.   Taking a job at Triumph, she gets caught up  in  the murder of fellow employee and friend.  She has come to NY from her Miami home, running away from  her personal  problems. She finds it  is hard to outrun your problems.  It is also hard in 1975 to break into the all boy network of comic artists  and writers.  Fun to read about all the real comic books and the cartoonists who are mentioned in this book.

Though it is fun to read about the industry, I did not find any characters that were developed well enough for me to care about whether they were honest or crooked or innocent or guilty.  The plot is just not built up well enough to make the book compelling.

The Man Who Was Thursday

 The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton is a very strange book.  The author Chesterton is also the author of the Father Brown mystery series which has been made into a great television series.

Though Father Brown has been a fun series to watch, I have never tried to read the books.  But this book is very different and unusual novel.  It is set as a mystery but does not follow the expected formula of a dead body that a detective uses to find a murderer.  

This plot centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory.

Gabriel Syme is a poet who argues in the park with another poet about whether poetry is about anarchism or the law. The man convinces Syme to join him at a anarchistic group meeting.  They make each other take a vow of secrecy.  In these group meetings each member takes the name of a day of the week.  The leader is Sunday.  No one in this book is what they seem.

A short book that is very complicated and has many very poignant messages.

The House of Spirits

 The House of Spirits is Isabelle Allende's first novel.  Allende is an amazingly prolific author with many  books that have won a plethora of awards.  She has also received many honorary degrees from a variety of univeritites and even a presidential award from President Obama.

This book was challenged in North Carolina to stop high school students from reading this book in school.  I did find it a difficult book to read in many ways. It was a complicated book to follow, as there are many characters to keep track of, some having very similar names.   It is written in the perspectives of two main characters, family patriarch, Esteban Trueba and Alba, his granddaughter.

The story follows the life of a family of four generations as they live through the post colonial social and political uprisings in Chile.  There are so many realistic but hard to read experiences of what happens during these turbulent times.  

The Trueba family's passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades.

The major characters in The House of the Spirits come from two opposing classes: the landed aristocracy and the peasants. Most of the population of Latin America, as well as all of the characters in the novel, belong to one of these two classes.