What I’m Reading: The Book of Lost Names

I was listening to a dud book.  I ended up going on Amazon to read the reviews of it to see if I was the only one or if others thought the book was a dud.  It turns out in reading the reviews I found someone who had reviewed the book, like me, thought the characters were hard to keep of.  In her review, she recommend this book saying she’d rather read this book over and over rather than read the other book.

Well, that had me looking for this book.  It sounded good.  The book was The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel.  It was a 6-month wait from one of the online libraries I use and the other one didn’t have it.  Impatient me decided to burn an Audible credit and get the book ASAP.  I’m so glad I did.

This is one of the best books I’ve read in a while.  It’s a WWII book.  The main character is a Jewish girl.  For those of you not wanting to read a lot about a concentration camp or a lot of violence, this book is a good pick for you.  It’s still gritty…just not extreme.

By the time I was two chapters in, I was completely hooked and wanting to read this and do nothing else.  One night I didn’t watch television and listened to this book while stitching instead.

Enduring the dud book was totally worth finding this book.  I ended up finding a different book by the same author through my online library and am currently listening to it.

I am happy with that book so far too!!  I’ll tell you more about it soon.

Here is what Amazon had to say:
“Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books when her eyes lock on a photograph in the New York Times. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in more than sixty 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 does she have the strength to revisit old memories?

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris and find refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, where she began 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.”

Amazon readers gave the book 4.7 stars.  I am going to give it 5 stars.  This RARELY happens.  It’s a true endorsement of how much I loved this book.

The author has quite a few other books and I can’t wait to read them all.  It’s great to find a good book but even better to find a new author to love!

You can find the book HERE on Amazon.
You can find a listing of all of the author’s books HERE.  Most of them look like they are historical fiction.  YAHOO!!