2 Stars
The novel opens in 2005. Eighty-six-year-old Eva Traube Adams is a semi-retired librarian living in Florida. When she sees the photo of a rare book in a New York Times article, she flies to Berlin to claim it. The majority of the novel, however, flashes back to Paris during the Nazi occupation. We learn that Eva is the French-born daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland. When her father (Tatuś) is taken away in one of the roundups of Jews in 1942, Eva and her mother (Mamusia) escape the city. Eva then becomes a forger, making false documents to help smuggle Jewish children into Switzerland. Knowing that some of the children are so young that they will not remember their real names, she and Rémy, a fellow forger, come up with a scheme to record their true identities.
The plot is implausible. For instance, Eva has no artistic training; all she does is doodle in a notebook, “a nervous habit that dated back to her childhood.” Nonetheless, on her first attempt she makes documents that are good enough to pass inspection and get her and her mother to safety, and in virtually no time, she is a master forger. If Tatuś wants Eva to have false papers and he has already paid for them with his life savings, why wait until the last minute to get those papers? Conveniently the forger reneges on his promise so that Eva has to forge her own papers! Merely to deliver some paper that can be used for false documents, a man insists on meeting Eva in person and alone? This meeting is just plot manipulation to bring together two characters. In the middle of a war at a particularly dangerous time, a man is able to find an English copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and place it in a specific spot?
Then there’s the book in which Eva and Rémy record children’s real names along with their new identities. They construct a code that they share with no one. What value does the book have if only three people know about it and only two can decode it? In the end it becomes a cheap device to add a romantic element.
Characters are unconvincing. Eva, for example, comes across as naïve and stupid. She has kept a pair of leather boots beside her bed “for the past year in case she needed to flee” but she has made no other preparations? The questions she asks Rémy when she first meets him are intended to give the reader information, but they make her seem stupid. When she finally understands where Rémy finds names for his documents, he says, “’You are bright’” but his earlier comment that her intelligence has been oversold is much more accurate. On the train trip to Paris with Rémy, she doesn’t seem to understand that they have to pretend to be a couple? She is told, “’Eva, you can’t tell anyone my real identity,” yet she immediately tells her mother? For everyone’s safety, personal details should not be shared but she divulges those to several people?
Eva is also very shallow. We get no sense of the depth of her faith. She identifies as a Jew, but her observance is inconsistent. Mamusia is very bothered by Eva’s possible relationship with a Catholic but Eva seems concerned only because of her mother’s reaction. Her interior monologues consist of little real reflection other than questions: “But how could that be when he wasn’t Jewish? Her mother would never forgive her, and what if Tatuś wouldn’t, either? How could she betray them now? . . . Would it be braver to follow her heart at the risk of failing her parents? Or braver to turn her back on a person she was forbidden to love so she could preserve the history being stripped from her people?” And, “Why had Eva let that define her life? Her future? And what if [he] never returned? What if he didn’t survive the coming months? What if Eva herself perished?”
To be perfectly honest, Eva is annoying. First, she is always blaming herself, even for things over which she had no control. This tendency to self-blame may be because of the belittling comments made by Mamusia, but her willingness to accept that everything is her fault suggests immaturity. Then there’s her constant fretting about whether Rémy knows she loves him. The repetition becomes tedious. He’d have to have no intelligence whatsoever to not know!
Mamusia is another character who is unbelievable. Not to mention unlikeable. She is constantly complaining and blaming her daughter. Eva tried to warn her parents about a possible roundup but she dismisses the warning as ridiculous. Later, she tells Eva, “’You let them take him! You knew they were coming and you just stood there and did nothing.’” And “’I’m disappointed in you, Eva, more disappointed than I’ve ever been.’” She doesn’t worry about Eva’s safety; instead, she just insists Eva go find Tatuś. She has no gratitude to those who have helped: “’So the priest gave you a bit of information. And Madame Barbier prepared us some food. So what?’” Much of the time, she sounds like a whiny child: “’You are in your own world, Eva, and there’s no room for me in it. . . . An apology won’t return your father to me.’” She does nothing to help the Jewish children who need to be sheltered, just spends her time – years – feeling sorry for herself.
Characters change, but those changes are not realistic. Mamusia goes from constantly denigrating her daughter to defending her? A man goes from speaking about a woman “’with a special kind of warmth’” to calling her “’pathetic cow’” and threatening her with torture and an excruciating death? Extreme circumstances do cause behaviour changes but, again, the author is manipulating readers’ emotions.
Given the events of the Holocaust, word choice seems poor. Eva thinks, “There was nothing to do but walk into the fire and hope she wasn’t burned alive”? Then there’s a description: “Loss would forever be etched on the child like a tattoo.”
The author can be commended for her extensive historical research, but to promote the book as based on a true story is deceptive. And there is so much wrong with this book, besides those elements I’ve already mentioned: the many plot holes, the contrived, unnatural dialogue, the predictable plot, the coincidences, and the unnecessary drama. This book will appeal to those who like sentimental books and Hallmark movies.
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