During World War II, Portugal was ostensibly neutral country. Interestingly, the country’s newsstands sold newspapers and magazines from various European countries, including Germany. Warring countries sent their intelligence officers to Portugal to scour magazines and newspapers to glean information on the enemy. The Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC) was created in the United States for gathering such documentations. The United States Library of Congress sent a contingency of its librarians to Lisbon to gather publications to collect and copy foreign publications.
This has all the making of an interesting angle on stories about World War II. Sadly, The Librarian Spy, by Madeline Martin is not that book. I know I am in the minority on this, but this book just didn’t live up to its hype.
The novel follows two women: Ava Harper, an American librarian working in the Library of Congress, and Elaine, a French woman in Lyon, hoping to join the Resistance. Elaine is the more interesting of the two. After her husband joined the Resistance, she began working as a printing apprentice and distributes an underground newspaper that contains information about the War.
Ava was recruited by the United States military to go to Portugal to gather information newspapers then microfilm them to send to intelligence officers. She is supposedly intellectual and an avid reader. To emphasize this point, the author has Ava make numerous references to pieces of literature, and notes that she carries her copy of Little Women everywhere she goes. She apparently received little training for this job, and her naivety is annoying.
This book did not depict the actual horrors and fears of living in Europe during Nazi-occupation. I would classify this novel as being for young adults. It is probably something I would have enjoyed in 7th grade.
