Book of Lost Names

 

One of the fun things about being a librarian is when you tell people, they will often ask if you've read their favorite book. I started having a lot of unusual foot pain recently, and after all my home remedies didn't work I went to see a podiatrist. When I told her I'm a librarian, she asked if I had read "The Book of Lost Names". I admitted that although I had heard of it, I had not read it and she gushed about it. So I read it.

I really liked it. Eva and her parents are Polish Jews living in Paris. When it falls to the Nazis, her father is arrested but Eva and her mother manage to escape and head towards Switzerland. They don't quite make it, but they do land in a little town in the mountains and Eva discovers she had a talent for forging the stamps on documents. She joins an underground ring of document forgers and starts creating new identities for Jewish children to help them escape the Germans. Eva doesn't want these children's identities to be forgotten so she and her fellow forger, Remy, create a code in a book kept in the library where they work. 

It was very engaging, I had a hard time putting it down. I really liked Harmel's writing style.