GRACE BOOK CLUB
Every Monday, Miss Grace will recommend a book by a woman writing quality literary fiction, memoirs, graphic novels, etc. We’ll keep it short and sweet, because we know you’re busy – need the dirt and then need to get on with the show – but here is a book we love and hope you'll find your way to reading.
SINS OF THE INNOCENT by Mireille Marokvia
Mireille Marokvia has pluck. In her memoir, Sins of the Innocent, recently out in hardcover from Unbridled Books, she tells the story of her young adult life as a French woman, a student at the Sorbonne, who follows her German artist lover to Stuttgart in 1939 for a stay of six months and ends up staying in Germany for the duration of the war. There is a keen and immensely likable intelligence at work as Marokvia’s story turns from the bright bohemian light of Parisian cafés to beam down the increasingly narrow and harrowing paths of life in Hitler’s Germany. As Marokvia’s lover, an outspoken anti-Nazi, manages to secure a post abroad completing military illustrations, coming home only on leave, Marokvia’s struggle becomes as much a struggle against isolation as against the dangers her outsider and anti-Nazi status pose. This is where the pluck comes in. Marokvia’s physical existence – hiking, biking, skiing, milking, weaving – plays into her dynamic, complicated form of survival and resistance. She is often scared, but never stops. The more dramatic episodes – being denounced as a spy, helping escaped prisoners reach the Swiss border – carry a good deal of novelistic suspense, but it is the portrait of daily life that quietly opens up a new perspective on life inside Germany during the war. And it is the light-and-air quality Marokvia brings to her prose, this compelling voice of a confident, adventuresome woman settled on what she wants, who is able to give such a complete, riveting, and idiosyncratic account of a wholly unexpected life.