Title: The Librarians of Rue de Picardie
Author: Janet Skeslien Charles
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group/Hachette, 2024; RRP $32.99
It is 1918 and Jessie Carson, a young American children’s librarian, is seconded from the New York Public Library (NYPL) to set up a library service 20 miles from the Front in war-torn France.
She is part of a highly select group of women chosen by Anne Morgan, daughter of multimillionaire Pierpont Morgan, and her friend physician Anne Murray Dike, founding members of the American Committee for Devastated France (also known as CARD), established in 1918. Its mission was to assist French citizens – men, women and children – left behind when the German army retreated, struggling to survive amid the human and physical wreckage of post-war regional France.
Jessie’s particular role was to establish a library service for children, delivering the escape and joy that books and stories can give to children in even the ugliest of circumstances. She had to adjust: turning ambulances into bookmobiles, conducting storytime sessions on blankets on bare ground, bringing book materials for parents as well. In doing so she also often, predictably, faced opposition from others who considered this to be unimportant, her labour needed for more practical tasks.
CARD also provided seeds and agricultural equipment to re-establish food crops, and medical assistance for the streams of wounded coming from the Front, and Jessie and her helpers also shared in these and many other tasks.
Anne Morgan’s silent film promoting CARD’s work in France
the findlay galleries
In another time and place, 1987 in the NYPL, library worker and aspiring writer Wendy Peterson is working in the Remembrances Department in the basement, photographing delicate old records to preserve them for the future. One of her tasks is to make photocopies of a box of newsletters written by CARD and it is there she finds Jessie.
The book moves between both times seamlessly: Jessie experiencing the horrific reality of war, from unceasing bombings to the individual stories of the people they work to help, including a sudden, terrifying order to evacuate when the Germans suddenly advance towards them, and then immediately into the ravages of the Spanish flu, and the growth of Wendy as researcher and writer as she becomes increasingly obsessed with uncovering Jessie’s story.
Through Wendy’s work decades later in Remembrances, we see the quiet world of recording, bearing witness from records and resources that would not have existed had not libraries collected, preserved and housed them. This is shown particularly clearly when Jessie suddenly disappears from the newsletters and Wendy is forced to search further afield.
an interview @ the book report network
Wendy Peterson is also attending a writing class conducted by a caustic professor where students are required to read pieces of what they are working on. This is where Wendy shares her first efforts of writing Jessie’s story. His caustic feedback includes raising the dangers inherent in Wendy’s growing identification with her subject, and in the process giving some insight into the challenges of the unavoidably subjective responses to influencing the believability of how accurately she is representing the history of another person and an organisation that did really exist.
Aiming always for the truth, she is also aware of her desire to honour an organisation that did undeniable good and whose existence she was shocked to discover seemed to have disappeared from the many stories of courage in wartime.
At one stage Wendy says, referring to the French women Jessie worked for and beside:
Little seems to be said about Frenchwomen during the war. It’s like they were never there. From the books I checked out, you might think that the entire French population was entirely made up of men. Yet while they were off fighting, wives, widows, mothers and daughters held the country together. Genteel women who hadn’t been allowed to work or study at university were now supposed to be nurses and doctors, teachers and farmers. Livestock and machinery had been commandeered for the war effort, so the women tilled the fields like oxen. They worked to provide for their families. Is anyone writing about them? (p 147)*
Who would this book please? Those who like to read either historical fiction or autofiction (fictionalised biography) – the genre to which it belongs – and those interested in true stories based on solid research in war settings, but not just as a dry collection of facts. There are moments of lightness to please, two romances perhaps on the risky end of that genre, but not out of place as love happens on battlefields too. The details about WWI in the French countryside match what we see on TV today, showing what it is like for those returning when the war retreats, and the enormity of the task of rebuilding homes and lives – reminding us yet again that suffering is not limited to the uglier manifestations of mustard gas, torn bodies and blood-soaked soil.
This is the third in a trilogy of books by Skeslien Charles about actual librarians during WWI, including mega bestseller The Paris Library and Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade. She has written for the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and is an international best-selling author whose work has been translated into 37 languages.
* This brings to mind Forgotten Warriors: Women on the Frontline, reviewed previously
Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell
Ballart Writers Inc. Book Review Group
Review copy provided by the publisher
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