Review of The Book of Lost Names

Like so many avid readers I have a TBR list. A list of books I heard about from other readers, bookish emails, reviews and even when I watch a movie and then discover "Hey, this was a book first!" My kids predictably fall back on books for many gift giving occasions (Hooray!) so, if asked I always have a title for them. I also faithfully consult my list at my local library, used book sales, when I decide to do a little online shopping and on infrequent trips to bookstores (my closest bookstore is 45 minutes away!).

So if you're an author with a book that made my list - Yay for you! But sometimes I don't list a title, just an author. As in, I want to read everything they have written. Kristin Harmel's The Paris Daughter was on my list but checked out on my last visit to the library but The Book of Lost Names was on the shelf. After reading it, I've crossed out The Paris Daughter and left Kristin Harmel. I want to read everything she has written! Do you have any authors on a Read Every Book They've Written list?

More About The Book of Lost Names

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a newspaper 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.

More About Kristin Harmel

Kristin Harmel is the New York Times bestselling, USA Today bestselling, and #1 international bestselling author of The Forest of Vanishing Stars, The Book of Lost Names, The Winemaker’s Wife, and a dozen other novels that have been translated into more than 30 languages and are sold all over the world. Many of her novels have been optioned for film and television. Her first novel was published in February 2006. Her latest release is The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau.

Kristin has been writing professionally since the age of 16, when she began her career as a sportswriter, covering Major League Baseball and NHL hockey for a local magazine in Tampa Bay, Florida. In addition to a long magazine writing career, primarily writing and reporting for PEOPLE magazine (as well as articles published in numerous other magazines, including American Baby, Men’s Health, Woman’s Day, and more), Kristin was also a frequent contributor to the national television morning show The Daily Buzz.

Kristin was born just outside Boston, Massachusetts and spent her childhood there, as well as in Worthington, Ohio, and St. Petersburg, Florida. After graduating with a degree in journalism (with a minor in Spanish) from the University of Florida, she spent time living in Paris and Los Angeles and now lives in Orlando, with her husband and son. A breast cancer survivor, she is also the co-founder and co-host of the popular weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction.

Thoughts About The Book of Lost Names

I appreciated the realism of the characters emotions in The Book of Lost Names. It was World War II in the French Resistance so they did brave things but...they weren't always brave. They were afraid. They were caught up in romance. They regretted their decisions. They wanted to escape. They were angry--not just at the Nazis but at their friends and family. They were guilty. They were real. Thank you Kristin for bringing to life such true characters.

This is the type of book you don't want to stop reading. I think I read it in two days of marathon reading sessions, always needing to finish just one more chapter as I tried to decide the motivation behind some characters' actions and the ultimate fate of others. Who would live? Who would die? Who was loyal? Who was a traitor? Kristin Harmel's writing seems to be addictive.

Reading this novel, it was easy to picture myself in the situation and wonder "What would I do?" I enjoy books that make me questions the characters decisions. Did they do the right thing? If not, when could they have changed their fate? I look forward to reading more novels by Kristin Harmel. Next up, The Paris Daughter.