I have found myself in the oddest of literary coincidences lately. I just finished the wonderful and I believe woefully overlooked memoir, Sins of the Innocent. Written by Mireille Markovia, who was born in France and fell in love with a German artist in Paris in the 1930s, this is the story of her life in Germany during WW2. The couple went to Germany to check on her ill mother-in-law but bad timing found them there as Germany invaded France - there was not going back. It's a really interesting story of the struggle for day-to-day life by Germans who did not want the war, something that I don't think has been covered nearly enough by most historians. Expect a long review in the April Bookslut.

At the same time I am reading Jo Walton's Farthing, a great alternate world tale set as an English murder mystery but in an England that signed a peace treaty with Germany in 1941. Seeing Walton's ideas about how the world turned out because of that (Germany did not takeover the planet but did end up with the European continent and a long protracted war with Russia) is fascinating reading (as is the very well crafted mystery). But comparing Walton's maybe with the realty of Markovia's struggle really gives the reader reason to pause and think. The whole thing has been so surreal, it's almost like I planned it.

In another interesting coincidence I've been enjoying Geraldine Mccaughrean's The White Darkness about a young girl obsessed with Titus Oakes who ends up on a frightening trip to Antartica while also reading David Crane's Scott of the Antarctic. Oakes was the doomed explorer/scientist credited with saying "I'll be gone sometime" who basically disappeared into the night in an effort to save his dying companions from the struggle to keep him alive. None of them made (of course) but Oakes' legendary stiff upper lip has lived on forever (even longer perhaps than Scott's heroic effort). Crane's biography is a bit of a doorstop but thus far quite readable and it promises to delve into how his repuation has raised and lowered in the decades since his death. I'm sorely tempted to review these two books together but I worry that since White is a YA novel (albeit a long and very well constructed one) the readers will not crossover. Of course it worked for me to end up with the two of them at once, so maybe it would work for others as well (or at least intrigue them that the two books exist).

My agent let me know that Harcourt has passed on my book (she forwarded me the email) and while I wish the editor there had loved it, I'm still oddly freaked out to have gotten this far. Real editors are reading my book. It's all very grown-up I think - and both exhilerating and terrifying at the same time. I must be a writer now, right? Officially, a real writer.

Can you imagine?