This historical fiction story in two timelines introduces the little-known real-life figure of librarian Jessie Carson, who traveled from the NYPL to war-torn France and introduced a novelty to communities there during World War I: children's libraries.
“I’m sorry that you lost your mother,” she said. “I suppose that the best ones are like mine. Somewhat annoying, forever pushing you to do what you don’t want to do. But gentle, too, like a pillow that softens a thousand blows from this hard life.”
I love a book about scrappy librarians, and Janet Skeslien Charles's historical fiction novel Miss Morgan's Book Brigade takes that setup farther into favorable Bossy territory by sending an idealistic, headstrong young librarian from the US to Europe and into a World War I setting.
The story is told in two timelines. The past timeline is based on the real-life NYPL librarian Jessie Carson, and Charles tracks Carson's journey to work for the American Committee for Devastated France, funded by billionaire heiress Anne Morgan.
In France, Carson not only helps rebuild communities destroyed by war, but along with her ambitious, inspired team of women, establishes something never before seen in France: children's libraries, where kids in war-torn communities can dream, lose themselves in fictional worlds, and try to recapture some carefree hours of their youth.
The more modern timeline introduces Wendy, a NYPL librarian in the 1980s. In a book-within-a-book structure, the aspiring author Wendy is searching for a book topic when she stumbles upon the bare-bones story of Jessie and the Cards, as the group of women working in France were informally known.
The more recent timeline allows for context for Jessie's story--little known and not well documented--beyond our reading of the original sequence of events, but the more recent story otherwise feels somewhat thin. Much of it centers around Wendy's falling in love with her vivacious coworker Roberto.
I listened to Miss Morgan's Book Brigade as an audiobook.
Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book?
Janet Skeslien Charles is also the author of The Paris Library.
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