Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade: A Novel

Fans of Janet Skeslien Charles’s other works will love her latest historical novel, Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade. Told in two different timelines, the story reveals the power and passion of women who fight to protect others even, at times, at a cost to themselves.

Librarian Jessie “Kit” Carson, what some in 1918 would call an old maid at forty, is invited to join the American Committee of Devastated France as a CARD. Her role will be to share books with children whose lives have bene upended by war, but when she arrives in France, she is unprepared for the danger and destruction she encounters. Still, she rolls up her sleeves and begins to work alongside her fellow CARDs to bring some semblance of peace to displaced civilians, some of whom have lost everyone they love.

Kit’s counterpart, Wendy Peterson (also a librarian and would-be fiction writer) in the 1980s, is less interesting than the woman she discovers while documenting artifacts in the New York Public Library archive. While Kit’s story is filled with intrigue and heart and a clear and specific devotion a cause, to the beauty of books and their power to save us, Wendy’s character is less developed and decidedly more annoying. She pines after a fellow archivist so much that she comes across as a lovelorn teenager, and her need to be liked is rather, well unlikable.

Still, Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade is a fascinating look at the CARDs who served during World War One, and while the story is fictionalized, Skeslien Charles’ inclusion of her historical references at the end of the book open the door to even more research about these incredible women for those who want to learn more.