The Paris Library

The author, Janet Skeslien Charles,  uses the American Library in Paris (ALP) as the centerpiece of this historical novel, where Charles actually worked as a programs manager for a time. Based largely on actual people and events, the book introduces us to the dedicated staff and loyal subscribers (patrons) of the ALP during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Told mainly from the POV of Odile, a young woman who has to fight her father to take a job at the ALP in 1939, and of Lily, a teenager in rural Froid, Montana in the 1980's. The book is about friendship, human failings, and the role that libraries and books played in sustaining the morale of war prisoners and hospital patients as well as those living under German occupation. When Odile gets the job at the ALP, it is a dream come true for her. Her aunt had been bringing her to the library since she was a child and that was where she learned to speak English. Her twin, Remy, is a law student who falls in love with one of Odile's colleagues, the children's libarian, Bitsi. When the Germans draw closer to Paris, Remy enlists, with Bitsi's support, which, for a time, strains the relationship between Odile and Bitsi. Eventually they come to be like sisters, bonded by their mutual love for Remy, who is wounded and imprisoned by the Germans. Odile also befriends the American wife of a British diplomat, who feels lost in a country where she has no friends and does not speak the language. Margaret becomes an indispensable volunteer at the ALP.  Odile is in love with, and eventually engaged to, a police officer, Paul;  one of the main secrets that is not revealed until the very end is why Odile is now living in Montana, the widow of American husband. Odile has kept to herself since her husband's death, but befriends Lily, whose mother has died, and tries to help Lily not make some of the same mistakes that Odile feels she has made. "The answers unspool in this well-plotted and richly populated novel" according to the New York Journal of Books.

Kirkus calls the book "an intelligent and sensuously rich novel of a young woman's coming-of-age." Publishers Weekly says it's "a delightful chronicle of a woman’s life in WWII-era Paris and rural 1980s Montana."

An absolutely must-read is the Author's Note which details what happened to several of the main characters after the war. The author's website also provides some wonderful archival materials to learn more about the actual people who staffed and supported the ALP.