I thoroughly enjoyed this fictionalized history of the underground library at Bethnal Green tube station in London during WWII. The story follows three women during the early stages of WWII (~1940). Near the beginning of the London Blitz, the German bombs destroyed the large and beautiful Bethnal Green Library, necessitating its relocation underground.
Juliet Lansdown has just taken the role of Assistant Librarian, a role usually reserved for men (who were of course in short supply). Jewish Sofie Baumann has managed to obtain a visa to leave Berlin for London as a household servant — also in short supply and one of the few ways Jews could still get out of Germany and go to the relatively safe shores of England. Katie Upwood, a library assistant, finds out she is pregnant shortly after hearing that her beau is missing in action, presumed dead. Together these women, and the growing community taking to the tube station for nightly shelter, form a support system for the predominantly female cast of The Underground Library.
Jennifer Ryan always gives her characters a happily-ever-after which made it easier for me to read of a harrowing time without too much additional stress which I greatly appreciate. I loved the attention to historically accurate details of the age — the big hotels fixing up their cellars for dancing, the women in internment camps on the Isle of Man teaching each other skills, the treatment of unwed mothers, deserters, efforts at Jewish reunification, and the fact that universities, rather than close, started opening up to women while the men were away — Margaret Thatcher got her 1943 Chemistry degree from Oxford! I also always love Ryan’s characters and the way they work to make the best of whatever situation they find themselves in — usually through some wonderful friendships. All learning to take whatever joy is available to them and cherish it.
Ryan does differentiate where her fiction veers off from fact in the afterward, and she covered (almost) all of the points that I had noticed being off while reading. However, one thing that does slightly irritate me is that in addition to making a woman the heroine of making the library happen, she also makes the male head librarian someone who tries very hard to get in the way of it being a success, except when Juliet flatters him and basically offers to give him all the credit. In fact (according to wikipedia) it was a male librarian and his male assistant who worked hard to get the library moved underground and kept it going! I don’t mind her making the characters female, but I think it’s sad to make the male character a “bad guy” when he wasn’t (I don’t see the need to empower women at the expense of men). It could be that Ryan has more information than I do, but I wasn’t able to to find it.
If the story sounds familiar, that may be because this is the second book to fictionalize this WWII underground library this year. The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson covers the later years of the war and was also very enjoyable. For those interested in the real story, here is a somewhat personal accounting: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Bethnal-Green-Tube-Disaster/. I’ve embedded a couple of photos in this post.
Thank you to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 12th, 2023.
Books to look forward to ... 