The Baker's Secret by Stephen P. Kiernan

This WWII survival story centers around 22 year old Emma.  She bakes bread in a small village in Normandy France.  The people are suffering from both from physical brutality and hunger during the German occupation.  She is ordered to bake 12 loaves of bread daily for the Nazi occupiers.  Her acts of resistance begin by adding straw to the flour she is given which allows her to make 14 loaves.  Those two extra secret loaves will not only feed her neighbors but allow her to set up an informal bartering system that allows many of the village needs to be met. Still there is more fear then hope in her daily existence - a sense that no one really cares what happens to the people of France.  There are some beautifully written passages in this story although it often seems to lack the weight of internal struggle found in similar books like The Nightingale .  Still it is well worth the read.

Louisa by Louisa Thomas

The subtitle of this book is "The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams" - that would be John Quincey Adams, third President of the United States.  Her life was indeed extraordinary.  She was British marrying an American from a founding American family.  She lived in Paris and Russia while JQ served in various diplomatic capacities as representative of a country that much of Europe still did not know existed.  She had four live births after multiple pregnancies and only one child out lived her.  She wrote three autobiographies that don't always square with the historical record. There was much to make an exciting story but this book is not that.  There were many interesting historical side trips that were enlightening but seemed impersonal.  I think Thomas missed the boat.  This would have been great historical fiction. Use all that historical research to make Louisa an inside observer to our early, clumsy history. Flesh out the complicated relationship between her and JQ.  She had opinions about the great question of slavery and women's rights so early on.  Historical fiction would have allowed revealing conversations between Louisa and the Grimke sisters or Jefferson or Abigail Adams or even JQ.  Yea - she missed the boat on this one.