People who fetishize books annoy me. Will share more later.

Protagonist Eva Traube Abrams is an elderly librarian and a Parisian 23-year-old of Polish descent when we meet her in flashback. She lives with her immigrant parents under the Nazi occupation. One night, while Eva and her mother are watching a bigoted neighbors kids her father is taken. Eva and her mother were on the list, too, so Eva shrewdly plans and executes their escape over her mother's objections.

There's nothing terrible about this book. It's just a little simple to me. The easy talent for forgery, the brief love triangle and love story, the reunions...they're all kind of annoying.

However, I do appreciate the premise of the title object. Children's given names are embedded in the book by Eva, who is sensitive to the fact that although the young Jewish refugees' lives are being saved by the French Resistance, their identities will be lost. I admire her ingratitude for the saving that isn't saving and her finding an encrypted method for keeping track of them.

I predict this book will make an excellent feel-good movie starring a largely non-Jewish cast.