The Paris Library is a must-read for book and library lovers, but be prepared to have your heart broken—and to get a bit bored at times.
(Photo credit: Amazon and Mollie's Bookhook)
The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles is in some ways akin to the French pastries it depicts—it’s fresh, memorable, well-crafted, and at times heartwarming, but you finish the story longing for more.
Skeslien Charles starts us off in bustling 1930s Paris: elegantly-dressed people mill about cobbled streets and worries of World War II are as distant as the sunset rippling over an evening sea. In this setting, we follow Odile Souchez, a young, clever, and book smart 23-year-old living in Paris. Despite the sexist framework of 1930s France, Odile seems to be on the path to an idyllic life: she has her dream job at the American Library in Paris, she’s madly in love with her dashing police-officer beau, and she has invaluable bonds with both her twin brother Rémy and her best friend Margaret.
But as war stops being a distant worry and instead becomes reality, everything changes. When Nazi soldiers occupy Paris and declare a war on words, Odile’s job as a librarian takes on a new importance: she must join the Resistance to help their Jewish subscribers who have been banned from the Library and whose lives are now at risk. Yet nothing goes as planned, and Odile soon finds herself immersed in grief, guilt, and unexpected betrayal.
Odile’s story sucked me in without promise of letting go.
Usually, I get hooked to a story by its thrilling plot—but this time, even though the plot was slow and at times unclear, Skeslien Charles kept me interested with the strength of her characters and the way she tells their stories.
From the very first chapter, I was drawn to Odile’s well-fleshed character and indisputable passion for literature: “I never judged a book by its beginning. It felt like the first and last date I’d once had, both of us smiling too brightly. No, I opened to a page in the middle, where the author wasn’t trying to impress me.” With lines like these, Skeslien Charles does an impressive job of giving Odile a clear voice, so much so that I feel like I had met Odile in real life.
Beyond this, Skeslien Charles’ writing is at once easily digestible (there are no long, rambling lines that you have to wrap your head around) and has just enough creative flourishes to make it a work of art.
“Snow tight-roped the telephone lines,” “in the space of a block, the city shrugged off her working-class mantle and donned a mink coat,” and “like book covers, some leather, some cloth, each Parisian door led to an unexpected world,” read some of my favorite descriptive phrases of hers. Another I love is when Margaret (Odile’s best friend) half-heartedly tells her husband he looks handsome, and Skeslien Charles writes that she “spoke the line as if it was from a tired drama she no longer wished to play.”
Though Odile’s storyline is undoubtedly captivating, it’s not the only storyline the book tracks—flash forward to 1983, and the backdrop of Paris shifts to a rural town in Montana. In Montana, we hear from an entirely new perspective: that of Lily, a teenager who’s mysterious next-door neighbor is none other than Odile. In Montana, Odile is nothing like she used to be—solitary, friendless, and now widowed—but after breaking the ice, Lily and Odile develop a strong connection despite their differences.
When I first came across Lily’s perspective, I was startled, as it seemed irrelevant to the main premise of the book. However, I quickly began to put the pieces together of why Skeslien Charles chose to include a second storyline. As I mentioned earlier, Odile’s storyline doesn’t move fast (and, actually, Lily’s goes even slower), but having a viewpoint from the “future” was a clever way for Skeslien Charles to make Odile’s story more alluring. Slow-moving plots are one of the dangers of historical fiction; when you’re telling the story of real people’s lives, like Skeslien Charles is, there aren’t many opportunities to provide haunting cliffhangers or thrilling twists. The second storyline, however, undoubtedly made things more interesting: it kept the reader wondering how does Odile go from working at her dream job in Paris and falling in love to finding herself in a rural part of an entirely different country? The answer, of course, is only unveiled at the end.
While I liked that the 1983 storyline provided a new perspective on Odile, what irritated me was that it had practically no plot, nor resolution, at all.
The premise of Lily’s storyline revolves around navigating family difficulties and the murky waters of adolescence, which, while interesting, felt like it was leading nowhere. Especially because Lily’s storyline happens during the Cold War, I would have hoped for something that could have better thematically connected to World War II.
However, what was great about the second storyline was that it underscored the greater morals of the book. Lily and Odile’s conversations bring to the forefront the power of envy, the consequences of actions, and what it means to truly forgive someone. Especially in Odile’s story, these larger themes were haunting, and I wish they could have been explored further—as I mentioned at the beginning of the review, I was left wanting more about the heartbreaking ending of her story.
Ultimately, I most recommend The Paris Library because of its outlook on World War II.
While World War II is a popular topic for historical fiction books, this book tackles the topic with an often overlooked perspective; as Skeslien Charles herself says in the epilogue, her goal was “to share this little-known chapter of World War II history and to capture the voices of the courageous librarians who defied the Nazis in order to help subscribers and to share a love of literature.”
The historical sources Skeslien Charles draws from are also powerful: her characters are based on real-life people (she even interviewed some of the characters’ children) and the “Denunciation letters” (letters which were written to Nazis denouncing Jewish people) were modeled off of those in the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah, France’s Holocaust Museum. Some of the included letters are real, and expose the saddening violence and irrationality of the letters.
All in all, if you’re looking for a book that conveys important historical implications in a creative way, this book is for you.
It’s not perfect—but the overall message is well-worth the book’s flaws. And beyond shaping your understanding of World War II, the book’s themes are also highly relevant today: in the words of Skeslien Charles, she hopes that the book will leave people pondering “what we can do now to ensure that libraries and learning are accessible to all and that we treat people with dignity and compassion.”
Warning: this book contains explicit sexual scenes and instances of violence. Recommended for high school students and above. Also, as this book takes place during World War II, there are mentions of anti-semitism that may be difficult to read.
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