The Things We Cherish | Pam Jenoff

It will come as a surprise to no one who has even glanced at this blog that I'm an easy mark for World War II stories, especially with strong female leads. I picked this one off the shelf at the library and thought it was pretty good. The author, Pam Jenoff, is a lawyer and worked previously in Foreign Service and the military, so she has a strong grasp of some of the grittier details. She worked at the U.S. Consulate in Krakow where she was involved in a lot of interesting work with the Polish/Jewish community, including the preservation of Auschwitz. This book is one of her earlier works (2011) but she has a long list of titles, including the last one that I read, The Lost Girls of Paris. I'm not going to lie--a lot of these stories (Jenoff's and others) are similar. But they are also based on real people who were extraordinarily courageous and I guess that's why I keep reading them.