The Librarian Spy

February 1, 2022

Chiaverini's Switchboard Soldiers chronicles the women of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, who weren't even eligible to enlist in the army but helped facilitate communication on the battlefield as bombs fell around them and pandemic raged during World War I (150,000-copy first printing). French Resistance fighter Elise and German soldier Sebastian fall in love in Occupied Paris and face moral crisis at war's end in Druart's The Last Hours in Paris (45,000-copy first printing). In Kidd's The Night Ship, sad-eyed young Gil is sent to live with his grandfather in a Western Australian fishing community and learns about the 1629 sinking of a ship whose passengers included the newly orphaned Mayken, sailing to what was then the Dutch East Indies (75,000-copy first printing). In Martin's latest, Ava is The Librarian Spy, working undercover in World War II Lisbon to collect intelligence and finding connection through coded messages with Elaine, apprenticed at a press run by the Resistance in Occupied France (150,000-copy first printing). Lock continues his successful "American Novels" series with Voices in the Dead House, which braids together the experiences of Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott in Civil War-torn Washington, DC. In Sister Mother Warrior, celebrated Island Queen author Riley conveys the Haitian Revolution through the stories of two women: Marie-Claire Bonheur, the first empress of Haiti, and West African-born warrior Gran Toya (100,000-copy first printing).

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May 15, 2022
This unusual WWII spy tale is based on the real-life work of the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC), an OSS-affiliated group organized by Fred Kilgour, later the founding director of OCLC. Multilingual Ava Harper is a librarian at the Library of Congress when she is recruited by IDC. Her assignment takes her to neutral but spy-drenched Lisbon, where she collects and microfilms print materials from enemy and enemy-occupied countries. Analysts then scour the documents for intel about Nazi strategy. Ava falls into a romance with a British consulate officer, and both attract the attention of German agents. The narrative jumps between Ava's story and that of Parisian resistance worker H�l�ne B�langer, who operates a clandestine printing press and attempts to secure the exfiltration of a Jewish woman and her son, using coded messages deciphered by Ava. Both plots generate suspense but are weighed down somewhat by an excess of melodrama and by occasionally trite phrasing (""jaunts down memory lane""). Still, the wartime ambience in both Lisbon and Paris and the thoroughly fascinating story of the IDC will please all lovers of WWII espionage.

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