A review by alundeberg
The Storyteller of Casablanca by Fiona Valpy

4.0

I have no memory of adding Fiona Valpy's "The Storyteller of Casablanca" to my Audible queue, but since it's about WWII, Morocco, the French Resistance, and one of the narrator's is a precocious Dorothy L. Sayer's mystery-loving thirteen year-old, the "whodunnit" is obviously me. In 2010, Zoe and her husband move to Casablanca with their baby as a way to salvage their marriage, and Zoe finds the diary of thirteen-year old Josie under a floorboard. In it Josie writes about escaping the Nazis in France and being a Jewish refugee in Casablanca while her father tries to get the paperwork in order to flee to America. The storyline alternates between the past and the present as Zoe becomes more and more engrossed in Josie's story while acclimating to her new life and dealing with an unstated grief. To cope, she takes up quilt-making and begins helping out at a refugee center. Valpy manages to (mostly) skirt the schmaltz that often plagues books about women in WWII by keeping the focus on the fish-out-of-water elements. Both Josie and Zoe have been thrust into a new life and trying to find a path forward while discovering the power of storytelling.

There's much about this book I enjoyed, mostly Josie's adventurous spirit and her relationship with her father. Valpy provides a lot of historical detail about the French and German occupation of Morocco during the war, and it was interesting to learn what life was like for a refugee who was not passing through Rick's Cafe. I also appreciated how Valpy includes the plight of refugees today and does not try to simplify or romanticize complex issues or make Zoe into a "white savior". However, the ending is predictable, and the "twist" made me go a little cross-eyed-- it could have been better executed.

Overall, I recommend it! If you are prone to crying, keep some tissues handy.