Library Loot Review: The Little Wartime Library

I cannot remember exactly where I first heard about The Little Wartime Library by Kate Thompson but where ever it was? Thank you from the depths of my A-grade read deprived soul.  This book was a venerable gem chock full of kickass female characters, dynamite world-building, angst and drama.  Even with it clocking in at nearly 500 pages I didn't want it to end.

Content Warnings: Domestic violence, Germans bombing the hell out of London = civilian causalities including children

Before the war Clara Button was happily married and the children's librarian at Bethnal Green Library. Then Hitler's bombs started to fall, making the library uninhabitable and killing Clara's boss.  She and her best friend turned Library Assistant, Ruby Munroe, move the library underground - to the unfinished Bethnal Green tube station, the work having been abandoned due to the war. Everybody in working class Bethnal Green has been touched by the war, and the unfinished tube station has become a defacto bomb shelter to some, home to others whose homes are no longer habitable thanks to German bombs. The library is a lifeline - Clara peddling hope, escape and nightly storytime to the children who sleep in the tunnel. Clara loves being a librarian; the work has been what has kept her going after her husband's death at Dunkirk and the miscarriage she suffered. And while her working annoys her mother and mother-in-law no end, her work has not gone unnoticed. She's been recognized with an award from the higher ups - unfortunately they've also gifted her with a sexist new boss who thinks Clara's "ideas" about librarianship are not only scandalous, but dangerous.

The other main player in this book is Clara's friend and Library Assistant, Ruby Munroe a brash, blousey girl hiding a lot of pain. Her older sister died in a tragic accident that Ruby partly blames herself for (had she not been late to meet her sister, would she still be alive?).  Her mother is a shell of her former self, married to her brutish, abusive second husband. Ruby is desperate to get her mum to leave the lout but she's become smaller and smaller, shrunken in, scared, frightened, with not an ounce of gumption left to call her own.

In between the personal trials and tribulations of Clara and Ruby is the story of a community living in a war zone, of the joy and triumph that can sprout amongst and around tragedy, and that romance can bloom even in the most trying of circumstances.  For Clara it's learning to love again when she meets an local ambulance man who served at Dunkirk but turned conscientious objector.  For Ruby it's the handsome American GI who is determined to woo her even as she sets seemingly impossible challenges for him before she'll say yes to a proper date (this guy ends up scouring half of England for 10 copies of Gone With the Wind for the library book group all because he's desperate for a date with Ruby - how can you not fall for this guy?)

This is a hard book to write a review for because a lot happens.  Thompson sprinkles in a lot of conflict into the book with key points getting resolved along the way.  The author does not wait until the end to resolve all the conflict, with issues like Clara's sexist boss and Ruby's vile stepfather dispatched well before the finish line.  What takes up the rest of the space in the book?  The characters and the world of wartime Bethnal Green. The trials and tribulations. The joys and the sorrows. The children growing up in a war zone (and not all of them surviving it...), the adults finding happiness when and with whomever they can. 

It's the little touches that make this book so great.  Thompson took a real moment in history (the Bethnal Green Library operating in a tube station during the war truly did happen) and sprinkled it with a ton of period color - including a notable appearance by Forever Amber by Kathleen Windsor that Ruby's American GI gets copies of and sends Clara's boss into a fit of apoplexy. Romance readers should totally read this book for this section alone - with Clara's boss berating the bodice ripper for giving the women using the library "unnatural ideas" and Clara should be providing "quality" so that the poor working class citizens can "better themselves" - assuming they're even capable of such a task. Seriously, this guy is like the villain of the century for genre readers everywhere.

This is first and foremost historical fiction but it does feature strong romantic elements. Clara and Ruby both get happy endings but there are tragedies along the way.  It's heart-wrenching and joyful all at the same time, the kind of book so rich in detail (and yet, firmly rooted as fiction) that I immediately went scouring the Internet after finishing to learn more about the Bethnal Green Library and why hasn't some publisher picked up more of Thompson's fiction for the US market yet?!

Is this an easy book to read? No. The violence that Ruby's mother is experiencing at the hands of her husband is very, very hard to read.  He gets his in the end, but the cost is high. There are Jewish characters in this book, the lack of news and uncertainty regarding family in Nazi-occupied areas is tense, to put it mildly.  It's a book set during a time of war, with Hitler dropping bombs on civilian targets.  People suffered, children died, but the resilience portrayed by the fictional characters in this story will stay with me for a long time.  Also, dare I say it, it reminded me of how powerful my profession and books can be.  There's a greater good to be found in books, fiction especially, don't let anyone take that away from you.

Final Grade = A

Note: A great nonfiction companion piece to this book is When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning. Seriously, every GI wanted to get their hands on the scandalous Forever Amber....