Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2017: Read a book about war. This jumped into my reading plan when I found myself without my current book, and in a thrift store with a great book selection. A patron recommended this to me many years ago, and I've always meant to pick it up. I found it hard to put down, and I've read a lot of WWII fiction. This one includes an intertwining timeline (1942 and 2002), and I found both stories equally compelling. Usually I am putting up with one while waiting to get back to the one I like better! 
 Sarah is a little Jewish girl in 1942 Paris. The French police round up Jewish families one terrible night -- obeying German orders, complicit in the deportation and eventual murder of thousands of French citizens -- many children -- in an event largely (and often, it seems, intentionally) forgotten in French history. When modern-day journalist Julia Jarmond is assigned to write about this history for a memorial event, she falls down a rabbit hole of empathy and horror as she learns connections between Sarah's story and her French in-law family. 
 There was a lot I connected to in this story. Julia is an American living in Paris, which I did for a short time. She is in a relationship with someone outside her culture and native language. (view spoiler)[(The part about her husband fearing losing his looks? This sensibility rang true, especially his difficulty in admitting it.) Many times, plotlines are about going somewhere exotic and falling in love. What if you've lived there for years, it's normal now, you still miss air conditioning, and you may be falling OUT of love? (hide spoiler)] Julia is used to considering history academically, but digging for the human side bowls her over emotionally. What do you do when the veil is pulled back and you can't see life the same way anymore? Examining one's role in a terrible event as a complicit bystander is difficult, if not impossible for some. 
 To me, the ending was a little too pat, but it did bring the story full-circle nicely. (view spoiler)[ (But really though, who can live in NYC as a single mom with two kids and one web-based job, and find an apartment instantly? That part stretched credibility a bit.) (hide spoiler)] 
 "I missed home -- what I had to call home, even if I had lived in France for more than half my life. I missed the casualness, the freedom, the space, the easiness, the language, the simplicity of being able to say 'you' to each and every person, not the complicated vous and tu I had never perfectly mastered and which still threw me." 
 "In the past few months, my life seemed to have shifted subtly...was it just a belated coming-of-age? I could not tell. I only knew that I felt as if I had emerged from a long-lasting, mellow, protective fog. Now my senses were sharpened, keen." 
 (view spoiler)["He was physically present in a friendly, useful way, but not there spiritually." 
 "When would he realize that it wasn't his infidelity I couldn't bear, but his cowardice?" (hide spoiler)]