Book Review: Last Train to Paris by Michele Zackheim

Last Train to Paris by Michele Zackheim
Published by Europa Editions (January 7, 2014)
Genre: historical fiction

My comments: An excellent weaving of historical fact into fiction, written with stark frankness. The novel will tell you more than you may already know about the perilous political and social situation of the Jews in France and Germany even before the war, of some who might have survived and some who didn't. This historical novel follows Rose, a young American reporter in the 1930s, to Paris and Berlin where she observes what takes place in France and Germany before the war. An old lady now, she writes her memoirs up to 1989 and ponders the fateful decision she was forced to make as she fled Europe before the war broke out.

Book description: "Inspired by the story of a distant cousin who was murdered in Paris in 1937, award-winning author Michele Zackheim’s book is a gripping epic about a half-Jewish female reporter from Nevada who writes for the Paris Courier in the 1930’s. The sole woman in the newsroom, she lives with both sexism and anti-Semitism.

Then she meets Leo, a German radical and anti-Nazi and realizes that while Paris is interesting, the truly vital historical story is taking place across the border. Rose undertakes an assignment in the Berlin press office, where she is initially happy and in love until Kristallnacht and the growing threat of Nazism. When World War II is declared, Americans are forced to leave the country and Rose must make an agonizing choice: Who will go with her on the last train to Paris?

Zackheim tells her story from vantage point of Rose as an elderly woman, Last Train to Paris is at once a historical epic, a love story, and a psychological portrait of one woman’s gradual discovery of who she really is after years of being invisible to herself." (publisher)

Michele Zackheim is a multi-media artist as well as writer. Her work is in the permanent collections of The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; The Albuquerque Museum; The Grey Art Gallery of New York University; The New York Public Library; The Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum, and The Carlsbad Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of two NEA awards, and teaches Creative Writing from a Visual Perspective at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Her first book, Violette’s Embrace, is a fictional biography of the French writer Violette Leduc. Her second, Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, is a non-fiction account of the mystery of the lost illegitimate daughter of Mileva and Albert Einstein. Broken Colors is the story of an artist, whose life takes her to a place where life and art intersect. Visit her Author website.

 See more reviews of Last Train to Paris.
Thanks to TLC Book Reviews and the author for a review copy of this book.

Sunday Salon: Winter Reading

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! Also visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer, and It's Monday: What Are You Reading? at Book Journey. Also, Mailbox Monday hosted by Rose City Reader this month.

I downloaded books for the first time on Edelweiss, thanks to an offer by William Morrow for the following e-galleys for review:

Tiger Shrimp Tango by Tim Dorsey. a mystery/thriller set in Florida.

A Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered That Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants by Ruth Kassinger, a history of the first botanists and info on the plants of today.

The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore, a "satiric Venetian gothic"
That Old Black Magic by Mary Jane Clark, Wedding Cake Mystery #4

I'd much rather have paper books in my hot little hands and will take print any day over e-books, but I am going to do my darn est to read these before they disappear from my computer. I only have them for 45, 52, 80, or 136 days, depending on the release date of the books.

I also found myself reading several books at a time, vowing to finish them all:

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan, Chinese-American fiction, a book from my shelves

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett, memoir and essay writing
Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith, spy thriller
Paws for Murder by Annie Knox, cozy mystery that I'm quite enjoying
I worry that I have Book-ADD (a term I made up) and am too easily distracted by a new book while I'm already reading one.

Review books and AREs (advance reader's editions) that came recently?

The Altarpiece (The Cross and the Crown Series, Book One) by Sarah Kennedy- an imagined h8istory of what might have happened to all the nuns after Henry VIII took over the church in England in the 16th Century.

The Last Train to Paris by Michele Zackheim, a romance, murder mystery, and suspense - historical novel set in Paris just before WWII

Children of the Revolution (Inspector Banks Novel #21) by Peter Robinson, police procedural and crime thriller

This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash, fiction

What I bought for myself, on Kindle:

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Berg, historical novel involving a family of botanists.

What's on your winter reading list? Keep warm!