The woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

American Virginia Hall was brought up to marry well and behave. Not likely.  A lover of adventure and great with languages, she aspired to a job in the state department in Europe.  An accident while on holiday in Turkey resulted in the loss of her leg below the knee and she soon found her career offers limited to secretarial positions.  But Europe was in the midst of WW11 and she was not going to safely sit at a desk and watch.  Refusing to accept any limitation from her prosthetic leg (who she names Cuthbert ), her language skills lead the British espionage agency to place her in France and eventually as an organizer for the resistance.  At some points this seemed a very journalistic impersonal telling of the events of the war when it was England alone against Nazi Germany.  When she is the center of the story, when it is her amazing story being examined, it reads much better.  Add it to Hidden Figures, The Woman who Smashed Codes and all the other stories now being told of the contributions that women have made and for some reason just never seem to be part of the bigger history we have learned.

Syria's Secret Library by Mike Thomson

The city of Daraya, Syria was bombed endlessly in the years around 2011.  Feared to be a rebel stronghold, residents lived under a government controlled siege until 2014 when anyone who remained in the city was rounded up, forced unto green buses and moved into refugee camps in the northern part of the country.  During those years of destruction and hunger, a group of young people searched the bombed and abandoned buildings for books.  In a secret underground room they created a library.  The "head librarian" was fourteen.
Why?  In various ways, those young people who risked both the gathering and the reading of books were saying, "You can destroy my home. You can starve my body.  But you cannot own my mind.  You cannot limit my thoughts. You cannot keep me from being the most of me I can be."  The war in Syria has been a travesty against humanity.  The evil that makes war happen always is.  But just as certain are the heroic few who push back against that evil - sometimes with powerful protests and sometime with hidden libraries.
Thomson is a journalist for the BBC who covered the war in Syria and personally knew the individuals and the war in this story.  It deserved telling.

The Ragged Edge of Night by Olivia Hawker

It is the final years of WW11, and Anton, forced to give up his friars frock, retreats to a small village outside of Stuttgart to atone for a past wrong.  He has answered an ad from a widow left with three children who is looking for a man to care for all of them in wartime.  Elizabeth is clear that she is not interested in another husband although they must be married for proprieties sake.  Anton sees caring for this one family as a way to assuage his guilt.  He long ago committed to celibacy so the arrangement works just fine.  But the evil that is Nazi Germany finds its way to their village and Anton and Elizabeth feel compelled to respond in anyway they can.  Anton risks his life as a messenger for the Red Orchestra resistance.  Elizabeth takes a stand against the man in the village assigned to guarantee the village loyalty to Hitler.  As their involvement becomes more and more complicated, I was prepared to hate the probable ending.  But this is a real story - part of the author's family history - so the ending was brave and good and right after all.

Virgil Wander by Leif Enger

A recent accident leaves Virgil with a head injury that affects his memory and his speech which makes his story both reflective and the dialog often internal.  He operates a marginally restored movie theater in a small town on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota.  The town is just as quirky as the rest of the people who inhabit it.  There is mystery, longing, regret and ultimately love to be pondered in the context of this town as it tries to recover from economic collapse.  The writing is frequently beautiful.  As Virgil recovers, we see the town react as only a small town can - in a way that in fact makes it one of the characters.  If you are looking for action, look elsewhere but if you are in the mood to reflect on his life and maybe your own, there are some lovely passages to guide you.

Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris

Ellis Reed is a struggling reporter in the Philly area during the Depression.  He takes a picture of two small boys behind a sign that says "children for sale".  Lilly Palmer, a secretary at the same newspaper, discovers the photo and urges Ellis to write an accompanying story.  The photo is ruined and restaged and, in today's terminology,  goes viral.  Ellis is promoted to a position on a New York paper but both he and Lilly are concerned about the truth of the photo, especially when they learn that the children in the staged photo appear to actually have been sold.  And so we follow the consequences of "fake news".  Can these two make it right?  How much can you stretch the truth until it is in fact a lie?
Of course there is always a backstory - for each of them in fact.  Both Ellis and Lilly are likable which makes the their faltering attempts at doing the right thing matter.  The photo was real - this particular story is fiction - but the reality of the decisions made in the face of bone crushing poverty is all too true. 

Writers and Lovers by Lily King

Thirty-one year old Casey Peabody is a mess.  Her years of eduction have left her with a huge debt which could all be erased if she could just finish the great American novel she knows she is just a few pages from finishing - or maybe a few hundred.  All that education has landed her a waitressing job with a lecherous boss at an elite Harvard club which only serves to peck at that debt but leaves her little time for writing.  On top of all that she has just lost her mother which leads to tearful outbursts at the most inconvenient times.
That being said, Casey shares her story with the satire and wit that reveals her intelligence and spirit. And hanging in Cambridge does provide some opportunity to rub elbows with other writers - some more successful, some less, some good friends and some troubling lovers.
This story lacks the heft of her earlier novel Euphoria but it was nice to revisit this time of life and think about how you survived your own 20's and 30's.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

In 1936 Cussy Mary Carter was the Book Woman for Troublesome Creek, Kentucky.  Every week she would ride on her trusty mule into the hills and hidden hollers to bring written material to individuals beaten by poverty and isolated by geography.  The week old newspapers, rebound novels and self-help scrapbooks Cussy constructed by herself were important to the individuals on her route.  It was a dangerous job for many reasons but Cussy was determined to avoid the sad life all around her and provide a precious few moments that weren't about hunger and cruelty and hopelessness.  At the same time, her blue skin caused some in the town to fear her and others to feel free to humiliate and abuse her.
This tragic and heroic fictional story sheds light on two real histories.  One is of the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Service which was one of the WPA programs designed by President Roosevelt.  In this case the hope was  to employ individuals to bring reading to one of the poorest and least educated parts of Appalachia.  The other is of the "blue people" who also lived in this area.  In the 1800's a man from Cussy, France emigrated to the United States and carried with him the genetic code for congenital methemoglobinemia which decreases the oxygen in the blood giving the skin a blue color. He settled deep in the Kentucky hills where the custom of marrying within the family kept the recessive gene more common than it would otherwise.
 Cussy's story is filled with Appalachian tradition and language and far more good luck than may be believable but she was a brave librarian - it had to turn out OK - really.