Important to Read

Sometimes books are hard on me as a reader. They bring tears. They cause deep thinking. My stomach churns. Time stops while I digest what just went into my brain and deep into my soul. Two recent books I read set me back a step or two: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and Half-Truths by Carol Baldwin. As with real estate's location, location, location, literature has setting, setting, setting. Both of these books are historical fiction set in a time period that could not have happened in any other era, (please God), France during World War II and North Carolina during segregation. 

This morning I came to the final Nightingale page, in tears I might add. This book is a tale of man's inhumanity to man...and woman. Yes, I had heard of the Holocaust, studied it in a superficial way, read other historical fictions, but not until I read The Nightingale did I really feel the horror on a character level. It was all about women and their resistance to Nazi takeover of their lives. It didn't end well for most of the characters, yet all was well in the end, at least as well as it could be. 

I seek out books about strong women, and the women in this book were indeed strong even though they lived through a starvation that weakened them, or maybe because of it. They stood up to impossible odds and when one particular character was liberated from the evils of a concentration camp at the end of the war, she said something to another that stuck in my mind: "We made it." I've said those words before at the top of a mountain or at the end of a long road trip, but this...this was different. They survived not only brutal, unimaginable tortures brought on them by a merciless invasion, they helped others survive and escape. They hid children. They guided downed British and American pilots to freedom. All while risking their own lives. Indeed, they made it!

I'm an author. I read like an author now, and I wanted to know the back story of this book, how Kristin Hannah came to write such a gripping saga. She told us at the end of the copy I had, explaining her discovery of the part women played in the European War, how it touched her into giving them a voice. She researched. She interviewed. She visited the sites she described and the Holocaust Museum. She turned her findings into a superb book, important to read...lest we forget and repeat.

This could not happen in America, I thought to myself. We wouldn't let people minimize others so much they thought of them as nothings. And then I remembered Carol Baldwin's book about the south during the Jim Crow days, days that I lived through myself. Days that happened on another continent before, during and a decade after the Germans were defeated. Days filled with Ku Klux Klan rallies and lynchings and cross burnings. 

This book had a strong woman, too, except that she was only in junior high school. She was just learning the inequities of Jim Crow and saw what it was doing to the black society that lived parallel to, but apart from her. I had read this book like a writer also. I was drawn to it by the main character, a white girl, who wanted to be a newspaper reporter and tell about what she saw. 

I know this author, Carol Baldwin, so I sent her a list of questions to find the back story of how she came about writing it, how she structured the telling of a very difficult subject. How she herself felt after spending long hours interviewing, researching and uncovering unthinkable actions against fellow humans. Again, important to read...lest we forget and repeat.

Next blog post, I'll share her answers.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen