Janet Skeslien Charles

I love, love, loved this book. It's one of those great stories that transports you and takes you away into the world of the book. It was a great story of a Paris librarian in Paris working in an American library and about how books and libraries/librarians help people and can make big differences in our lives and how this library/group of librarians helped.
It goes back and forth between present-day and past telling the story of a Paris librarian who now lives in America telling her backstory and how she helps and becomes friends with a teenage girl going through rough times with her family in the present day.
It's a great, magical read that you get lost easily in and it surprised me with how much I loved it and how great it was and now I have a big book hangover - go read it!… (more)

I'm a bit torn about this book.
It kept my interest and at times I had a hard time putting it down. I liked that one storyline was set in the 1980's. I liked the character of Lily and I found her to be very realistic. I really liked that despite how she felt about her step-mom at times that she still really loved her brothers.
I loved that the storyline set in the 30's-40's took place in a library and that they discussed other books although I would have liked a bit more of that.
I liked that the book kept you guessing and wondering why Odile ended up married to someone else. I thought it portrayed well how people were just trying to get through each day during the war and sometimes people felt like they had no choice about the things they had to do and also how some people just didn't think about what was happening. For example, Odile didn't think about who had lived in the places they were visiting. Whether this was right or wrong I think it was something that people during that time period would have struggled with.

Now for the things I didn't love. I felt like the open door sex scenes, though brief were completely unnecessary and I don't know that I could recommend this book because of them. I also felt like the book was a bit heavy with all the grief. Lily's story was so sad and I had a hard time reading through that at the beginning. Of course any book dealing with WW2 and Jews being taken away is hard to read, but this one felt more weighty than some of the others I've read.
Overall I wanted to know what happened in the story and I read through it quite quickly but I wouldn't read it again.
This book was reviewed on the Literary Club Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/1984185/episodes/12864876… (more)