Fans of Pam Jenoff know that her historical novels don't just tell a story. They insert us right into the middle of shocking events most of us have never heard of that deserve to be exposed.

The French capitulated to the Germans during WWII, and many didn't seem particularly opposed to assisting when it came to the impoundment of the Jewish French population. The French police joined in with the Gestapo to help round up the Jews of Paris, and many French citizens were only too happy to take for their own apartments that had belonged to Parisian Jews. Jenoff shares a little-known facet of that war in LAST TWILIGHT IN PARIS, a fictional account that takes place partly in Lévitan, the French furniture store that served as both a Jewish detention center and a shopping mecca for Nazi officers during the war.

"One of Jenoff's strengths as an author is her unerring ability to find obscure events that happened during WWII and tell them through the voices of fictional people she brings to life.... In LAST TWILIGHT IN PARIS, she has some truly clever twists in store for us as we try to reconcile the events in all the timelines."

Jewish prisoners were housed in the store and forced to sort and polish the stolen belongings of the Jewish people whom the Germans sent to concentration camps. The story is told through the eyes of Helaine, a young Jewish woman who lives in Paris with her wealthy parents at the start of the novel, and Louise, who is from London and had volunteered for the Red Cross during the war.

What connects these two ladies is a gold necklace called a mizpah, which Louise finds in 1953 at the bottom of a box of mostly rubbish that she sorts through at the local charity thrift shop. When she sees it, Louise is taken back to her time in the war, when she saw it in the hands of her friend, Franny. Jenoff is a master at doling out just a bit of information at a time so that we remain engrossed in the story and can't wait to uncover all the truths. We know that the necklace is important to Louise and that she feels some guilt related to it, but we don't know why.

Franny’s death has haunted Louise. When she discovers the necklace, which she is convinced is the same one because of a chip on the top, she is determined to find out what really happened and why Franny died. Jenoff unfolds the story through Louise's first person narrative and Helaine's third person narrative. At first, the different timelines are a bit confusing. But Jenoff repeats the pattern of a chapter with Helaine's narrative starting in 1938 and moving forward chronologically, and another chapter with Louise's narrative beginning in "present-day" 1953 and traveling back to 1944 to recount Louise's activities then.

It's difficult to envision how Jenoff will pull it all together and what Louise will find out about the necklace and its missing half. These were the days before computers and the internet. All records were paper, and many were destroyed by the Germans at the end of the war.

One of Jenoff's strengths as an author is her unerring ability to find obscure events that happened during WWII and tell them through the voices of fictional people she brings to life. In doing so, she shines a light not only on little-known atrocities, but also on small, inspiring acts of courage. While on one level we know that the characters are not real, we can't stop reading as we are invested in seeing how their stories play out. And Jenoff is a magnificent storyteller. In LAST TWILIGHT IN PARIS, she has some truly clever twists in store for us as we try to reconcile the events in all the timelines.

Perhaps now, more than ever, it's important to read and share books that demonstrate the evil of unchecked power and the dangers in demonizing "the other." Reading about Helaine and Louise, two ordinary women who might have been separated by the English Channel, religion and their war experiences, but were connected by their human emotions, we observe their love for their family and their struggle to make sense of a world gone crazy.