BOOK REVIEW: The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin

My history/historical fiction book club’s next pick is The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin. In this WWII-based historical novel, two women use their literary-adjacent talents to help the war effort.

Ava is a librarian at the Library of Congress, who is tapped by the military to go to Lisbon, a neutral country, to gather intelligence. Her job is to collect as many newspapers and other documents that slip into Lisbon from war-torn countries as she can. Then she helps photograph them for transfer to microfilm so that they can be shipped to the U.S. and evaluated. Determined to do her part because her brother is a fighter pilot and she wants the war to end before he is injured, she doesn’t feel what she is doing is dangerous. And yet, it seems a German fellow, Lukas, a likely spy, is trailing her. And a British fellow, James, is paying her a great deal of unexpected attention as well.

Elaine is a French patriot living in occupied France, whose protective husband has been doing his best to keep her from sticking her neck out. When he goes missing, she joins the resistance. At first, her role is to help distribute an underground newspaper. And then, when it becomes known that she is familiar with running a mimeograph machine, she begins working for the press itself.

Their work intersects when Elaine decides to help a young Jewish mother and child escape occupied France and Ava discovers Elaine’s secret message encoded in the Nazi-banned newspaper.

The contributions of women in WWII is an entire subgenre unto itself, and this is a fine addition, exploring lesser known modes of aiding the war effort.

BOOK REVIEW: Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

I’ve been reading some beautiful but painful-to-read books lately. Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas is another. Originally published in 1947 in Norway, it is being re-released by The Modern Library in an English translation by Bibbi Lee.

Set in the mid-twentieth century (contemporary at the time, but now historical), it’s the story of a woman who suffered terribly at the hands of an older man, her high school teacher, with whom she’d fallen obsessively in love at seventeen. He slept with her, used her, pretended to care for her when it suited him, and repeatedly tossed her aside. 

The novel is unusually structured. It’s in the first-person viewpoint of another older man, who is relating the story as told to him by the woman in one long alcohol-infused night. They are strangers who met at a train station. (In this way, it reminds me a little of The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque.)

The woman is older now, thirty-eight. The events of her life are not presented chronologically because that is not how memory works. She’s haunted by the relationship and what it has cost her, but at the same time, she is clearly still in love with the man who destroyed her. She suffered abortions, poverty, and alcohol abuse, all of which fed upon each other to send her into a downward spiral of despair.

The fact that the woman is not named makes it feel both anonymous and universal. It is a cry for justice.

Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a powerful novel and highly recommended. However, as a content warning, there is a graphic description of a self-induced abortion. 

BOOK REVIEW: Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

I read Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore for a book club. It’s a gripping (and enraging) account of the young women exposed to radium in their occupation of painting luminescent dials for watches and military equipment. After its discovery, radium was considered a miracle drug, touted for everything from a cure for gout to an aphrodisiac to a beauty treatment. But its most exciting property was that it glowed.

Women were entering the work force in large numbers in the WWI era, and working in the dial painting factory was considered a plum job. Women were uniquely suited to painting the tiny numbers on the dials. There was no protective equipment, despite the radioactivity of the radium-containing paint, because the dangers were not recognized (or not acknowledged.) And worse, the women were taught that the best way to bring the delicate paint brushes to a precise point was to wet them between their lips. And so for months, even years, these women ingested minute but cumulative doses of radium day after day after day.

And then, usually after a couple of years had passed, often when they were no longer working for the company, they began presenting to dentists and physicians with a mysterious array of symptoms, commonly including disintegration of their jaw bones, loss of teeth (and pieces of bone), hemorrhage,  purulent eruptions, and bone pain. Eventually, it became clear that they were suffering from radium poisoning. A deadly and incurable disease. But the men owning the companies and the higher ups who were all getting rich, denied the possibility and refused any concessions to the women. Instead, they fired troublemakers. They called the women hysterical and insinuated there was nothing wrong with them. And when the women banded together in lawsuits, mostly to get settlements to pay for medical care (they were all essentially bankrupted by job loss and medical bills) the response of the companies was to stall and appeal, hoping the women would die and the suits would be dismissed. (They also declared bankruptcy, reorganized, and reopened elsewhere.)

It’s an important book. And while it’s true that studying these brave women advanced medical science, and that in the aftermath, important industrial safety measures were passed, the most vivid scenes in the book are of the horrific pain and suffering experience by these women, and the callousness and greed of corporate men.