I wanted to share a Historical Fiction Novel called Number 12 Rue Sainte-Catherine: and Other Stories by Roberta Hartling Gates I received in exchange for this review. Inside this post is my affiliate links. If you click on the links and make a purchase I will make a small percentage from the products you purchase.
If Charlie was #Homeschooling full time I would have had him read Number 12 Rue Sainte-Catherine: and Other Stories as part of his #History class. Although the Author created an excellent collection of related short stories, all of them based closely on the painful history of Nazi-occupied France. At times I found the book confusing and hard to follow but that shouldn’t keep you from check out the book.
The author, Roberta Hartling Gates, has built these stories around real people, including Jews rounded up by the Nazis, a historical British spy, the French resistance leader Jean Moulin, and especially Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon.
The Author has brought us historical fiction tyranny and power. manipulation, takeover, and evil and no, this isn’t the typical book I would read but the storyline intrigued me and I thought my dad and Uncles would have enjoyed the story so I read it in memory of them and I am glad I did as I learned things I didn’t know and I believe you will as well.
About the book:
Though unexceptional in every way, Klaus Barbie, a mid-level Gestapo chief, ruled Lyon, France, like a medieval tyrant from 1942-44. Crowds parted to let him pass; a table was permanently reserved for him at Le Lapin Blanc, Lyon’s raciest nightclub; and pretty young women slipped him notes inscribed with their phone numbers. But his glory days represented only a thin slice of his life. What prepared him for his role as the so-called Butcher of Lyon, and what became of him after the war ended? In an attempt to answer these and other questions, this collection of nine wide-ranging and skillfully written stories presents Barbie in a variety of guises, from that of a vulnerable young boy, to a preening young man on the make, to an enfeebled old man forced to confront his crimes forty years after the fact. Though wars and their excesses flare up and die down, evil is always with us, promising a god-like dominion over others that seduces those who are weakest. This book is a reminder of that.
Meet the Author: Roberta Hartling Gates
I’m Roberta Hartling Gates, a fiction writer and former English teacher who grew up on a farm in Iowa. I’m a graduate of the University of Iowa and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I now live in Riverside, Illinois, near Chicago, with my husband.
A collection of my short stories entitled Number 12 rue Sainte-Catherine and Other Stories is forthcoming from Running Wild Press on September 9, 2024, so watch for it!
In 2021 I was awarded the Dogwood Literary Prize in Fiction and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Other awards include being named a runner-up in Solstice’s short story contest (2017), a Narrative finalist (2013), and a Nelson Algren finalist (2002). An unpublished collection of my short stories entitled At a Loss was a finalist in the Gold Wake Press contest (2020) and a semifinalist for Hidden River’s Eludia Award (also in 2020).
My work has appeared in literary magazines such as Confrontation, Fourth Genre, the Beloit Fiction Journal, and elsewhere. I have an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and am also a reader for The Examined Life Journal. I am now at work on a novel set in Vichy France.
