Every Time We Say Goodbye

Finished June 18

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Natalie Jenner

This is the third book in the series The Jane Austen Society. It is set mostly in 1954-1955 with flashbacks to a related storyline in 1943. The main character is Vivien Lowry, a British playwrights. She's recently premiered her second play on the London stage, but it wasn't well received by critics. Her contacts, which include several well-known women including Peggy Guggenheim, Daphne du Maurier, and Ava Gardner, arrange a job in Italy for her, working on the script of an American director. Many of those working on the film have left the United States due to the McCarthy investigations, including her fellow writer American Jew Levi Bassano, a young man who served with a Field Photo unit in the U.S. armed forces during World War II. The lead actress in the film is American Claudia Jones, a beautiful biracial woman who passes for white. As she engages with the film community in Rome, we see other real people enter the story, including a young Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and Gina's husband Milko Skofic. Vivien becomes friends with Claudia, who recently starred in a film as a nun and who is making some life decisions of her own. We also see the strong influence the Vatican had on the film industry at the time. 

Vivien is still coming to terms with the disappearance of her fiancé David, who had been captured by Italian forces during the war and then gone missing. She hopes to be able to gather more information while she is still in Italy. 

An Italian director is looking to do a film about a young woman known only as La Scholaretta, who was a partisan during the war and who was executed for the assassin of a Nazi SS Commander. He also has a personal connection to her story. In the 1943 portion of the plot, we see this young woman in the hours surrounding the assassination and her motivations and actions during this time.

I found it interesting to see how these two plots came together and how the repercussions of the war were still being felt during this time. As part of the series, this book centres women who make their own careers and decisions and who support each other doing so. 

I also enjoyed learning that the author is Canadian. 

The Last Train to London

Finished January 15
The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton

This novel is set mostly in the Netherlands and Austria. In the Netherlands, the main character is Truus (Geertruida) Wijsmuller-Meijer, a woman who smuggled children out of Nazi Germany, and then out of other countries controlled by the Nazis, prior to and during the Second World War. She told the children that she was saving to call her Tante Truus, and although she longed for children of her own, she and her husband Joop never were blessed with them. Truus was a real life woman who did this work, and although she was taken prisoner a couple of times by the Nazis, she lived through the war and was held in high esteem and with great affection by the children she saved. While most of Truus' story is based in fact, some small liberties were taken for the purpose of the novel.
In Austria, we follow young Stephan Neuman, born into a wealthy Jewish family who made chocolates, as he turns sixteen, seventeen, and nears eighteen as his world falls apart when the Nazis take over Austria, his parents' business, and his home in Vienna. Here we also see his little brother Walter, who has a much-loved Peter Rabbit doll he takes almost everywhere with him. Stephen wants to be a writer, specifically a playwright, and his model is Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. One of Stephen's classmates is Zofie-Helene Perger, who is a mathematical prodigy and the daughter of journalists. Her father died mysteriously on a trip to Germany before the story begins, and her mother has continued the newspaper they owned even as her own life and liberty become threatened by the Nazis.
As we see Truus' mission to save children become more difficult and dangerous, we also see her determination and the special relationship she and her husband had that made her work possible. In Austria, we see how Stephen's world collapsed so quickly from one of privilege and opportunity to one where he had to struggle just to stay alive. We see his mother's determination to save her children, despite her own illness, and the trust of young Walter that things would be better. For Zofie, we see her determination to stay true to her friendship with Stephen even when their differences in religion divided them under the Nazi regime, and how she defied her grandfather, who was trying to protect her, in helping Stephen in the ways that she could.
Clayton brings these times to life, with all the emotion that the characters felt. A great read.