Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade
Following on her best-selling The Paris Library, Charles returns to the book stacks for a dual-timeline novel centered on the Great War and the lives of several extraordinary women. As World War I rages in 1918, Jessie Carson (1876-1959), a New York Public Library employee, joins the American Committee for Devastated France. Organized by “debutante” Anne Morgan (1873-1952), millionaire Pierpont Morgan’s daughter, and physician Anne Murray Dike (1879-1929), members call themselves “Cards.” Carson, nicknamed “Kit” by fellow Cards, is stationed at Blérancourt, a 17th-century château in northern France, near the bomb-destroyed Red Zone. She strives to bring libraries to war-torn France’s children.
In 1987, aspiring novelist Wendy Peterson also works at the NYPL, where she is documenting Card manuscripts. Arriving at work, she greets “Patience and Fortitude”, the mud-smeared marble lions who guard the library entrance. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Patience and fortitude conquer all things, and since I began at the NYPL two years ago, it’s been my motto. Not so much for the job, but for my writing career,” she muses. Readers take in the city sights, like the Morgan Library and Museum, as Peterson becomes infatuated with telling the Cards’ stories.
Some will find the storyline overly predictable and the writing, at times, too transparently clichéd (“Books were necessities”; “When it’s the right man, you know”; “History is about perspective,” etc.), and those seeking humor won’t find much of it. Still, literary allusions abound —mostly to children’s books, from Anne of Green Gables to The Wizard of Oz, but also Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Lewis Carroll’s Bones of the Moon. An author’s note includes several period photographs, as well. Charles’ fans should be entertained while they learn about France during the Great War.
