the paris library a novel by janet skeslien charles

The wind whipped my hair, and I tucked tendrils under my tam hat.

I strode from my family’s apartment on the sooty rue de Rome, across from the Saint-Lazare train station, where locomotives coughed up smoke. I held fast to these facts and figures, hoping they’d make me appear qualified to the Directress. Now, at the desk in my bedroom, I prepared for my job interview at the American Library, reviewing my notes one last time: founded in 1920 the first in Paris to let the public into the stacks subscribers from more than thirty countries, one-fourth of them from France. His royal collection was the beginning of the Bibliothèque Nationale. In England, while Henry VIII was busy chopping off his wives’ heads, our King François was modernizing his library, which he opened to scholars. Along with the numbers, I’d studied the history of libraries, going back to the 1500s. In my bedroom late at night, in the morning on the way to get croissants, series after series-810, 840, 890-formed in front of my eyes. NUMBERS FLOATED ROUND my head like stars. Odile helps Lily navigate the troubled waters of adolescence by always recommending the right book at the right time, never suspecting that Lily will be the one to help her reckon with her own terrible secret.īased on the true story of the American Library in Paris, The Paris Library is a mesmerizing and captivating novel about the people and the books that make us who we are, for good and for bad, and the courage it takes to forgive. As Lily uncovers more about Odile’s mysterious past, they find they share not only a love of language but also the same lethal jealousy. Odile’s solitary existence in gossipy small-town Montana is unexpectedly interrupted by her neighbor Lily, a lonely teenager craving adventure. Again and again, they risk their lives to help their fellow Jewish readers, but by war’s end, Odile tastes the bitter sting of unspeakable betrayal. After the Nazi army marches into the City of Light and declares a war on words, Odile and her fellow librarians join the Resistance with the best weapons they have: books. When World War II breaks out, Odile stands to lose everything she holds dear-including her beloved library. Young, ambitious, and tempestuous, Odile Souchet has it all: Paul, her handsome police officer beau Margaret, her best friend from England Remy, her twin brother who she adores and a dream job at the American Library in Paris, working alongside the library’s legendary director, Dorothy Reeder.

Based on the true World War II story of the American Library in Paris, an unforgettable novel about the power of books and the bonds of friendship-and the ordinary heroes who can be found in the most perilous times and the quietest places.

The paris library a novel by janet skeslien charles