When you visit the Village Library you see stars—not the knocked-over-the-head kind or the Hollywood kind, but stars on the spines of books. The stars indicate a Staff Pick, a book that one of the staff has read and loved.
“Fabulous” and “haunting” are just two words Lucinda uses to describe this week’s Staff Pick, “Lilac Girls”, a debut novel by Martha Hall Kelly. Inspired by the life of a real World War II heroine, it is a story that needs to be told; a story of unsung women and their quest for love, freedom, and second chances.
New York socialite Caroline Ferriday has a post at the French consulate and a new love on the horizon. But Caroline’s world is forever changed when Hitler’s army invades Poland in September 1939–and then sets its sights on France. Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager, senses her carefree youth disappearing as she is drawn deeper into her role as a courier for the underground resistance movement. Meanwhile, the ambitious young German doctor, Herta Oberheuser, takes on a new job and finds herself trapped in a male-dominated realm of Nazi secrets and power. The lives of these three women are set on a collision course when the unthinkable happens and Kasia is sent to Ravensbruck, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women, in a story that will keep you bonded with the characters, searching for the truth, until the final pages.