There are a lot of historical fiction books surrounding WWII and most of them follow male characters that are fighting in the war. Kristin Harmel’s The Book of Lost Names takes a WWII historical fiction book and turns it into something incredibly unique for a genre that can often seem overdone. Harmel takes aspects of a true story to create an incredible tale filled with action, passion, and love during one of the darkest times in human history. Eva Traube is a French born Jewish woman living with her parents who left Poland years before to hopefully start a new life in France. As the Nazi’s begin invading Paris, Eva and her mother flee and end up in a small town in what was called the Free Zone. Eva finds herself helping a network of underground people forge documents for Jewish children so that they can smuggle them into Switzerland where they will be able to live a free life. In the process of doing so, Eva creates a book with a code alongside her partner, the handsome Rémy, where they are able to preserve the real names of the children. Sixty years later after Eva thought that the book was stolen by the Nazi’s and gone forever, she sees an article with her book and hops on the next plane to be able to reclaim it.
Harmel has created a slew of characters that at times can have different names because of the forgery that Eva and Rémy are doing to protect children. Even though some characters names change a few times throughout the story, Harmel manages to keep the reader in the loop of what is going on without causing confusion and without missing a beat. Each of the characters in The Book of Lost Names is well developed with solid storylines and keeps the reader guessing what’s going to happen next. Eva and Rémy have a close connection throughout the story and Harmel does an excellent job at pulling at the reader’s heartstrings as the potential love story evolves throughout The Book of Lost Names. Eva’s story has been written in both the “now” and the “then”, with Eva’s “now” being in the first person and Eva’s “then” being in the third person. Eva’s character is written this way so that the older and younger versions of Eva are clearly the same person shown from two perspectives; it is excellent.
Harmel has written a brilliant historical fiction novel that is based on actual events from WWII. It is clear to the reader that a lot of research has been conducted, which in turn has made for a wonderful piece of historical fiction with facts sewn in. The Book of Lost Names shines light on a part of WWII that is not normal focused on and because of that it becomes and incredibly engaging story that will keep the reader engrossed until the very end. Harmel’s writing is near flawless and because of that there is no redundancy and words and sentences flow together effortlessly. Historical fiction, particularly fiction about WWII seems to be overdone and retold over and over. The reader is shown that there are parts of history that have yet to be told and a story about forgery and saving innocent children’s lives can be just as action packed as a story based on the front lines.
The Book of Lost Names is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Inspired by an astonishing true story from World War II, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis in this unforgettable historical novel from the international bestselling author of the “epic and heart-wrenching World War II tale” (Alyson Noel, #1 New York Times bestselling author) The Winemaker’s Wife.
Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it’s an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five 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 will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?
As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins 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.
