Nevermore: Run Away, Sarah's Key, Big Magic, We Were Always Free, Last Train to London

Reported by Laura

The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton, set in 1936, focuses on one woman’s efforts to transport children to safety through the Kindertransports. Truus Wijsmuller, a member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life to smuggle Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the countries that will accept them. This becomes an even greater task after Hitler’s annexation of Austria as many countries close their borders to the fleeing refugees. The reviewer found it a good book written about a difficult time in history when people began to turn on each other and the Germans came in and documented everything. This one will definitely tug at your heartstrings.

          Our next reader loved the book We Were Always Free by T.O.Madden Jr.  It covers 200 years of the history of Culpepper, VA focusing on the family of Mary Madden, a poor Irish immigrant who became pregnant by a slave owned by Col. James Madison, father of the future president. This child, Sarah, though a free mulatto, became an indentured servant to the Madisons and worked until the age of 31 to pay the fine of her birth. T.O. Madden is one of Mary’s descendants who found the documents and information in a hidebound trunk in 1949. The reviewer found this to be a very thorough and interesting book.

           Big Magic is a nonfiction book by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. In this book, Ms. Gilbert advocates creative living beyond fear. She asks us to embrace our dreams and face down our fears. Our reviewer enjoyed the book.

          The next book, Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay, is heartbreaking historical fiction. It tells of a 10 year-old Jewish girl who is arrested, along with her family, by the French police in 1942. Thinking she will return shortly when everything is straightened out, she locks her younger brother in a cupboard to save him. Hauntingly, she is unable to return.  In 2002, a young journalist is asked to write a story about that dark day in France’s history and her research leads her to Sarah and her family. The reviewer recommends it as a good book.

          Our last selection was Harlan Coben’s Run Away. It tells the story of a father whose troubled daughter runs away from home. By chance, he sees her in Central Park, but she is clearly in trouble and runs from him. He refuses to let her go and follows into a dark, dangerous world where murder is commonplace. This book was recommended as a very interesting and exciting book.

War Nevermore: War is a Force, Cavaliers and Roundheads, and Sarah's Key

"Ain't gonna study war no more" isn't a phrase used at Nevermore, because war is a frequent book topic both in non-fiction and fiction.  Here are some of the books about war which were discussed recently:

Foreign correspondent Chris Hedges has covered conflicts all over the world, from the Sudan to the Balkans to the Americas.  He’s studied accounts of historical warfare (including Shakespeare’s portrayals) to compare with contemporary wars, looking the ways they differed and were similar.   The resulting book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is a fascinating look at “the virus of war,” a disorder to which human beings seem all too susceptible.  War brings a complete breakdown in morality, and makes for a black and white world in which soldiers on our side are not only good, they’re all heroes; those fighting for the other side are all evil. Battles are glorified; dissenters, even artists or musicians, are silenced. This seems to be true through both time and place. Jud Barry, our director, felt this was definitely a book for reading and reflection.

 

Speaking of conflicts, there was a lot going on during the English Civil War, none of it good.  Christopher Hibbert’s book Cavaliers and Roundheads does an excellent job of presenting the war on a more personal and intimate level. Communities and families were divided; collateral damage was enormous.  Hibbert highlights the personalities involved, including some of the minor players whose names aren’t as well known as Charles I or Oliver Cromwell.  The religious component was enormous, but it was more nuanced that a simple matter of Protestant against Catholic. This well-written, revealing and well-researched account is highly recommended.

World War II is the catalyst for the novel Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. In 2002, journalist Julia Jarmond is writing a 60th anniversary piece on the round up of Jews in Paris, which were done with the complicity and sometimes active participation of the French authorities.  As Julia does her research, she discovers that the apartment where she lives once belonged to the family of a young girl named Sarah who was taken along with most of her family by the Nazis. Left behind is Sarah’s younger brother, who is hidden in a locked cupboard. The novel alternates between past and present, as Julia learns more about the fate of Sarah’s family and of a very dark period of French history.  Jud found the book to be a well-written, plot driven book with good pacing which drew him in quickly and kept the pages turning.

Nevermore: You Came Back, Low Pressure, and Sarah's Key

To paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never really past. It exists in the present too. The Nevermore fiction choices all seem to reflect that sentiment in one way or another.

One of our Nevermore reviewers was much taken with You Came Back by Christopher Coake. Mark Fife was devastated by death of his young son, Brendan.  His marriage to his college sweetheart fell apart, and they divorced.  Just as he is starting to put his life back together with a new girlfriend and a flourishing career, he gets a call from a woman who lives in the Fifes’ old house.  She claims that the house is haunted—by Brendan. Our reviewer found it to be a moving exploration of love, loss, and relationships, and said she couldn’t put it down.

Continuing the theme of how past and present can collide, Low Pressure by Sandra Brown was mentioned as a good light read.  A young woman writes a novel based on her sister’s murder eighteen years earlier, causing a tabloid reporter to take an interest in the case.  Unfortunately, someone else takes an interest too—someone who may know more about what really happened that stormy day.

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay begins with Julia,  an American journalist living in Paris with her husband and daughter. She’s asked to write an article about the Nazi round-up of  Jews in Paris, which happened 60 years previously.  As she begins her research, she finds out the apartment where they’re currently living had belonged to a Jewish family caught in the round up. The book goes back and forth in time, weaving together the story of Sarah Starzynski  in 1942 and Julia’s life in the present.  This book has come up several times in Nevermore, and has always been highly recommended.