Kate Scarth

And I think one of the things that I love about this book, I guess the main thing, is this honoring of people whose lives were taken from them.

And it's this honoring through the book and through the search for them and recuperating their lives and their stories and their names.

And I've realized that, and this is true with all of the books that I've chosen today, how much I enjoy when that search, like the research or the exploration of the material that becomes the book when like it's foregrounded in the book itself.

Like I really, I really, I just find that really compelling.

Yeah, I mean, it's such a good question because I listened to this book on audio.

My daughter was only about a year and a half old.

And there are some absolutely excruciating moments involving children separated from their parents.

And I'm not sure how I was able to carry on with this book, but I did.

I did really just find it so compelling.

And maybe because there is

there are all these terrible things, but the book is always focused like on the ties that bind, like the family, the love and recuperating these people's stories.

And so maybe that's a reason why, because I know, for example, I tried to read Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet.

I couldn't read Hamnet in that moment or Colson Whitehead's book, The Underground Railroad.

That's when I couldn't read when my daughter was small, but

Yeah, but the postcard for some reason, I don't know, it doesn't necessarily make sense because it is harrowing emotionally.

Yes, whereas in Hamnet is direct experience, right?

What is happening?

What happens to the child?

Yeah, maybe that is true that in some ways, like me as the reader and the investigator, we're like on the same side of the fence, right?

Like looking over at something that's already happened a long time ago, maybe?