The library’s heroic American director, Dorothy Reeder, really did face down intimidating visits from Nazi officials, negotiated an agreement to keep the library operating during the occupation, and remained at her post until 1941. If we read “The Paris Library” from beginning to end, with no peeking at the final pages, we may be shocked when we discover in the Author’s Note that what we assumed was fiction in regard to the American Library actually happened. Part of the story is also set in the 1980s in Froid, Montana, where Odile lives after becoming a war bride. Throughout the rest of the novel, we meet the rest of the library staff, the eccentric patrons, and the dangers that they, and Parisians in general, faced during the Nazi occupation. In “The Paris Library,” Janet Skeslien Charles gives us Odile Souchet, a young French woman who in the winter of 1939 follows her love of literature straight into a position at the American Library in Paris.
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