The ventriloquists

When the Belgian newspaper Le Soir was co-opted by the Nazis during WWII and turned into a propaganda-spewing daily, it didn't sit well with members of the Front de l'Indépendance, especially maverick journalist and prankster Marc Aubrion, who, together with several of his fellow Resistance members, published a parody edition, Faux Soir, in 1943, which mocked Hitler and the Nazis. From these historical facts, debut novelist Ramzipoor has fashioned a compelling historical thriller that details the 18 days in which Aubrion and his team managed to write, print, and distribute their astounding parody. After being rounded up by the Nazis and told to fabricate articles for Le Soir about the evils of the Allies or face execution, Aubrion and his colleagues decided to go a different way, knowing that to do so would almost certainly mean their deaths. Mixing real-life figures and fictional characters, Ramzipoor tells the story in flashback, from the point of view of one of the troupe called Gamin, a young woman posing as a newsboy to survive on the streets of Brussels, who documents the Faux Soir story to a modern-day journalist, who has her own ties to the gang of six intrepid conspirators. The stories of the six are all fleshed out in such a way that readers will be wanting to hear more about each one of them, and layered over the personal drama is the remarkable saga of how 50,000 copies of a newspaper were published under the thumb of the gestapo. This is a long book, but it is never less than engrossing.--Bill Ott Copyright 2019 Booklist