THE BOOK OF LOST NAMES by Kristin Harmel

Eva and her mother are called to a neighbor’s flat in Paris to watch her children while the neighbor has to deal with a family emergency.  The real emergency, though, is that Jews are being rounded up in the city, and the authorities whisk away Eva’s father to a detention camp.  Eva then uses her artistic skills to forge identity papers that will allow her and her mother to travel to a fictional town in France that is known to harbor Jewish refugees.  As if the Nazis were not a big enough threat, Eva’s mother resists every move Eva makes on their behalf.  She is in denial about the danger and believes that the arrest of her husband is just a mistake.  Eva’s talent for forging documents makes her a valuable asset to the Resistance, especially in helping to smuggle children into Switzerland, but Eva’s mother continues to be a thorn in her side.  This novel is not great literature, but I mostly enjoyed it anyway.  It’s a love story and an adventure story with a villain whose identity the author does a poor job of concealing, although perhaps that was her intention.  The ending is quite predictable as well, but this is the kind of book where I raced to the end without much consideration for the quality of the writing or lack thereof.  Despite the two timelines—the 1940s and 2005—the plot is a cinch to follow.  There is a section describing a code based on the Fibonacci sequence, which I am very familiar with from a math standpoint, but I had to reread this section several times to get a sense for how it was being applied.  Understanding how this code works is not crucial to the plot, however.  What is crucial to understand is that the code is used to document children’s real names, along with their false identities, since many of them may be too young to remember their true identities if they survive the war.