The Travels of Daniel Ascher

March 23, 2015
In this slender, haunting French novel, Helene Chambon is a 20-year-old who arrives in Paris in 1999 to study at the Institute of Archeology. She is staying with her great-uncle, Daniel Roche, a world traveler and author of the popular Black Insignia young adult book series, published under the pen name H.R. Sanders. Helene begins dating a fellow student, Guillaume, who turns out to be a devotee of the series. Helene, who has never been a fan of the books or close to her distant great-uncle, becomes curious about his personal history, because of Guillaume. She knows that her great-uncle is Jewish, that he was adopted by her family during World War II, and that his real name is Daniel Ascher. As she works to excavate her great-uncle's past, Helene comes to understand that Daniel's life is a series of mysteries. And the closer she gets to unlocking them, the more mysterious he becomes. The author has written a novel that takes the reader back to the occupation of Paris and France's complicated history with its Jewish population. The narrative reads like a mash-up of Sarah's Key and The Book Thief, and it adroitly straddles the line between adult and YA literature. A piercing meditation on memory and history, perhaps the book's greatest gift is the way it makes the reader believe that the Black Insignia series is real.

March 15, 2015
Levy-Bertherat's debut novel is a story about storytelling-both historical and personal.Helene arrives in Paris in 1999 to study archaeology. She befriends a group of students, including Guillaume, a whimsical man who adores the work of H.R. Sanders, a beloved author of young-adult adventures. "H.R. Sanders" is actually the pen name of Daniel Roche, Helene's great-uncle, in whose Paris apartment she happens to be staying. The plot becomes more tangled when Helene and Guillaume begin investigating Daniel's past, including the time before he was adopted into Helene's family, when he was a young Jewish man in Paris during the Nazi occupation. In examining her great-uncle's history, Helene finds herself rereading his books; she'd never before seen the magic in them, but soon she finds herself devouring them with renewed interest, even as she approaches the kind of adventure found in their pages. The best moments in Levy-Bertherat's short novel involve people falling into stories, whether it's Helene almost missing her train stop due to an engrossing chapter or characters constructing personal histories for themselves in order to hide-or perhaps to heal-past traumas. But for a novel that focuses on the excitement of storytelling, there's little excitement here. Never does one get the sense that Helene is in any sort of danger. She simply wanders from location to location, talking to people with ease, without the author ever developing a clear sense of the stakes. The writing is lovely, yes, but the novel suffers from not deciding what it wants to be: it neither excites enough to be great young-adult fiction nor does it dig deeply enough to be a compelling novel of ideas. Despite occasionally heavy subject matter, it's a lightweight intellectual exercise.

Starred review from June 1, 2015

A hit in the author's native France and an Indie Introduces Debut Authors selection here, this limpidly written novel feels like a fairy-tale adventure when it first opens. And no wonder; its heroine, Helene, is the grand-niece of Daniel Roche, otherwise known as H.R. Sanders, author of "The Black Insignia," an ongoing YA series with a Harry Potter-like following. But fairy tales can be dark and adventures can hide real pain, as Helene learns when she starts unfolding her family history with the help of her friend Guillaume, a fellow archaeology student in Paris and a "Black Insignia" devotee. Born Daniel Ascher, her great-uncle was a Jewish orphan adopted by the Roche family during World War II, and the novel revisits that awful time with a clear-eyed lack of sensationalism. VERDICT All fiction readers will love.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2015
Adopted as a child, Helene's eccentric great-uncle Daniel is the odd man out in their family, the only one unmarried, the only one with itchy feet that send him traveling all over the world, and the only one who is a writer, the author of the popular children's series the Black Insignia, written under the pseudonym H. R. Sanders. What is the meaning of the pseudonym, and what does it have to do with Uncle Daniel's pre-adoption name, Daniel Ascher? How many identities does he have, and what do his books reveal about his life . . . or lives? An archaeology student, Helene decides to find out, using her training to sift carefully through layers of the dusty past in search of a fundamental truth that may remain forever elusive. In the process, though, might she discover a surprising truth about her own life? French author Levy-Bertherat has written an engaging yet ultimately melancholy and moving novel about a search for meaning with its roots buried in WWII France. A slender story but a satisfying one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)